A Baltimore coldwave séance — L'Avenir's Animism

"Animism" opens Secrets with no preamble. A drum machine pattern locks in, a synth line curls around it like smoke, and a voice arrives from somewhere just behind the mix. It does not announce itself. It is simply there. The track runs 4 minutes 55 seconds, and for most of that time you're listening to a man alone in a Baltimore basement with a roomful of 1980s analog gear, addressing the occult with the unhurried confidence of someone who has been doing this for fifteen years. 1

L'Avenir is the coldwave project of Jason Sloan, a Baltimore electronic musician, sound artist, and video artist who is also Professor and Chair of the Interactive Arts and Sound Art program at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). 2 He founded L'Avenir in 2011 with a specific premise: dark synth, new wave, and electronic music made purely from analog and vintage equipment, no shortcuts. 2

Secrets is the eighth L'Avenir album, and Sloan's Bandcamp discography lists 22 releases total — a back catalog of LPs, EPs, splits, live recordings, and compilations built across fourteen years. 1 Prior records include Imagination, Shadow & Reflection, Requiem, Mirrors of Expression, and Soir, released across partnerships with EINS:ZWEI:ACHT (a Swiss/German label) and Cold Beats Records (Barcelona). 2 The most recent release before Secrets was The Wanderer EP (March 27, 2026), a three-track digital release with its own video for the opener "Turning Wheel." 1

Sloan has also been working as a video artist under the Soleil Noir Studios banner. L'Avenir's "Kaleidoscopic" video — from a split with KISS OF THE WHIP — won Best Experimental Music Video at the New York Film & Cinematography Awards and was selected at the Luleå International Film Festival and Purple Sky International Film Festival. 3 Separately, his ambient score for the short film Between death and is a semi-finalist for Best Original Score at the NYC Planet Cinema Independent Film Awards. 3 Post-Punk.com's Alice Teeple describes his approach as treating "electronic music as architecture as much as emotion: a corridor of blue light, a stairwell descending beneath memory, a voice arriving from somewhere just beyond the visible wall." 4

"Animism" is the first single from Secrets and its opening track. Teeple's premiere piece on Post-Punk.com — published May 26, four days after the album's May 22 release — calls it "a coldwave séance of mineral calm and occult motion." 4 The description holds. It's not a high-energy track; the tension is architectural, structural. The drum machine sets a deliberate pace while the synthesizer layers accumulate slowly, and the vocal phrases ("The yew lives forever / We dance 'round the flames / A whisper into silence / Return from that we came") are drawn from occult symbolism — the yew tree being a long-standing marker of liminality between the living and the dead. 1

The album dedicates itself: "For G.I. Gurdjieff & HPB ∴ ⦿" — referencing the mystic philosopher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff and the Theosophical Society co-founder Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. 1 This is not casual occult aesthetic. Sloan has built the album's lyrical framework around the same 19th-century esoteric tradition that influenced much of goth and coldwave's European lineage in the first place. UK magazine Electronic Sound offered a single-line assessment that landed on the Bandcamp page: "Nostalgia weighs heavy in this study of time and truths." 1

The gear list on Secrets is an excavation in itself: Roland TR-707, SH-101, Juno 60, VP-330, ARP Odyssey, ARP 2600, Korg MS-20m, Moog Matriarch, Yamaha DX7, Ensoniq ESQ-1, Casio CZ-5000, and a custom Eurorack modular system. 1 For the video production side, Sloan also runs video synthesizers including the LZX Vidiot and a custom modular video synth — the visual language of the "Animism" video, with its glitch-art blue/purple palette and silhouetted figure in trees, comes directly from that setup. 1

Secrets is a proper physical release, not just a digital upload.

The vinyl edition is 99 copies pressed on violet clear vinyl at €30, available through EINS:ZWEI:ACHT. 5 US copies are expected to arrive in early-to-mid June 2026; European orders go through eins-zwei-acht.com directly. 1

The CD at $12 USD comes in a limited digipak with a full-color lyric booklet, and the package bundles The Wanderer EP plus remixes from KISS OF THE WHIP, CHILD OF NIGHT, and MADURO — 74 minutes of material total. 1 The digital download runs $10 USD in 24-bit/44.1kHz on Bandcamp. 1

The album has 13 tracks in total: 10 originals plus 3 remixes. It was written, recorded, mixed, produced, and mastered entirely by Jason Sloan at Soleil Noir Studios in Baltimore, during the fall and winter of 2025. 1

Bandcamp (full album stream + purchase): Secrets | L'Avenir — $10 digital, $12 CD, vinyl through EINS:ZWEI:ACHT. Also on Spotify. 1