Compact Utility is the solitary vision of one human in Central Ohio, a project built from the ground up in isolation. Every sound on Life’s Not A Gift was performed and engineered by Thane Leshner, then shaped in collaboration with trusted people, mixed by longtime friend E.M. Jones and mastered by Greg Obis of Chicago Mastering Service.
The video for happy mode was filmed in Amaranth Abbey, a haunted 1800s mausoleum whose last audience had been silent for more than a century.
A line from the project’s internal monologue lingers as a statement: “If you start talking to yourself and no one’s there to disagree, everything you say is true.”
Life’s Not A Gift is Compact Utility’s debut EP, created during a mental break. Each track maps a different emotional rupture: apathy, fear, anger, manic detachment, and feels like a portrait of instability rendered in distortion and tension. The post punk density of happy mode represents the sound of trying to outrun oneself in a room full of real or imagined apparitions.
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Compact Utility
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