Bipolar Explorer

Pronounced “holy sonic icons” by legendary BBC 3/Soho Radio broadcaster Max Reinhardt, their work described by France’s Les Oreilles Curieuses as “celestial and spell-bounding compositions alternating between spoken word and emotional flights of lyricism, astounding us with beauty - brilliant, luminous and cathartic”, Bipolar Explorer are an NYC-based experimental dreampop trio consisting of Summer Serafin (vocals, spoken word), Michael Serafin-Wells (guitars, vocals, baritone guitar, bowed guitar, bass, Moog synth, organ, melodica, tape loops, spoken word and percussion) and Sylvia Solanas (spoken word French/English, backing vocals). 

The band’s 12th album and 5th double album - Memories of the Sky - was released on December 1, 2024 on independent NYC label Slugg Records. The new album was previewed by WFMU’s legendary Irene Trudel who opened her November 25th show with a rare live set from the band, including ten songs, an interview and framed by new tracks from the album itself.

Max Reinhardt of London’s Soho radio pronounced it “An even more sonically expansive album, filled with ever more exploratory sonics, liminalism, lost and found, hauntology - it’s kind of like dreampop futurism.”

California’s KFJC, in a five star review said of the band and the album, “It is, quite simply, their crowning achievement, their finest work thus far”, naming it to their Top Releases of 2024. A full two months after its release it had reached the station’s number one slot as their most heavily played album.

In a interview with Tiberio Faedi of Italy’s Silent Radio, Serafin-Wells explained both the continuing expansion of the band’s sound with new instrumentation (chiefly the edition of Moog synth, baritone guitar and tape loop manipulated field recordings) as well as the double-album’s recurrent themes.

Taking its inspiration from Louis Janmot’s epic series of paintings, “Le Poème de l’âme”, Memories of the Sky is a double-album, 22 tracks over two hours, conceived as a continuum and titled individually - Disc One: “The Clouds Darken”; Disc Two: “A Winter Light” - as a kind of celestial navigation of the journey.

The album closes with a track - “The Distant Horizon” - originally commissioned by the UK’s Cities and Memory project (which pairs field recordists with composers to create new works) that Serafin-Wells composed and the band recorded contemporaneous with work on the album. The track also closes the Cities and Memory album “Sounds of Adventure” and was released as a digital-only single by the band in April 2024. The group decided to include it as a special bonus track as it seemed so very much in the spirit of the album itself. As Serafin-Wells says, “I kind of can’t hear the record now without it.”
 

The evolution of the band’s sound across a dozen years and as many albums - beginning with 2012’s Of Love and Loss (named to Ground Control Magazine’s “Best Albums of the Year”) through 2017’s Dream Together, largely considered the group’s breakthrough album (cited by France’s Indiemusic as “magical and majestic - a tour-de-force” - might be marked by two significant developments. 

Firstly, the signature interweaving of spoken word into the band’s work (described by the UK’s Norman Records as “a cross between Slowdive and Laurie Anderson - a late night radio transmission drifting to us, half asleep in bed”) with narrative poems composed and underscored by Serafin-Wells and voiced by Ms. Solanas. 

And secondly, the more experimental pieces that began appearing on the band’s albums, compositions that folded in field recordings with new instrumentation and tape loops, as they began contributing to the UK’s storied experimental radio project, The Dark Outside. A collaboration that resulted in a collection of those very works - Forests, Voices, Coastlines, Dreams - in 2021. 

A sextet of albums - Sometimes in Dreams (2018), Til Morning is Nigh (2019), Deux Anges (2020), In The Hours Left Until Dawn (2023), Memories of the Sky (2024) and Last Lights (2026) - perhaps best exemplify the band’s sonic storytelling, weaving together strands of the experimental, the ambient, spoken word, field recordings sprinkled with instrumentation and shoegaze-y compositions in a kind of eclectic, deep-listening dreamscape.

Additionally instructive as to the band’s process is the 2019 documentary directed and shot by Ms. Solanas for Slugg Records: The Making of “Til Morning Is Nigh.” Comprised of an six-part interview with Michael, filmed on location in iconic settings around New York City, and including five videos from Til Morning (2018) itself, the film was rolled out episodically over six consecutive weeks on the band’s YouTube channel and can now be seen in its entirety both there and on the Slugg Records website. 

Speaking to this very point about process, inspiration and the band’s mission, we might look to the reception of Deux Anges commensurate with its release in 2020. In addition to its naming to four Best Albums of the Year lists (including that of legendary BBC 3/Soho Radio presenter Max Reinhardt) and a flurry of glowing reviews, one - by renowned London zine, The Sound Projector - seems particularly prescient and may best characterize the whole of the band’s work. 

As Editor Ed Pinsent describes it: “Steeped in a very wistful melancholy, a poignant longing. Lyrics emerge as a form of prayer and we continue to find allusions to the afterlife, heaven, angels, mortality, ghosts, miracles... and compassion, empathy, and hope.”

These themes, of course, permeate the group’s work, which began in earnest as Michael began new compositions in light of and after the tragic loss of his partner, Bipolar Explorer co-founder, Summer Serafin, who passed away in 2011, just 31. 

As Michael told Indiemusic’s Raphael Duprez in a feature about the band (February 2017): “All of this is entirely for her. I often say that our music, each album, is of, for and about her. It’s my way of telling people about her and talking to her myself. That’s the “for’ and “about” parts of the equation. And Summer remains an integral part of the band - not only as its inspiration but, because I have lots of her isolated vocals from other recording sessions - as her voice, both spoken and singing, graces each record. I’ll write songs and fly in her voice. Summer isn’t the main reason BPX goes on, she’s the only reason. She is the reason. And I think I can trust that I’m doing things for the right reason if I always know the reason for it is her. Not out of any ambition other than to honor and conjure her. She’s my conscience."

Of equal importance was the addition of French-born vocalist, Sylvia Solanas, who joined the group in 2018, singing backing vocals and voicing Serafin-Wells’s original narrative spoken word poetry beginning with their 8th album, Til Morning is Nigh. 

In addition to their recorded work, the band also produce a fortnightly hour-long radio show of experimental, ambient and dark pop music - Bipolar Explorer’s “The Other Room” - which airs on both France’s CAMP Radio and Scotland’s Tak Tent Radio. An archive consisting of every show previously aired can be found on the show's website https://www.bipolarexplorer-the-other-room.sluggrecords.com/.
 

Bipolar Explorer's albums include Last Lights (2026), Memories of the Sky (2024),  In The Hours Left Until Dawn (2023), Forests, Voices, Coastlines, Dreams: Recordings For The Dark Outside (2021), Deux Anges (2020) Til Morning Is Nigh (2018), Sometimes in Dreams (2018), Dream Together (2017), Electric Hymnal (2016), Angels (2015), their holiday album - BPXmas (2014),  Of Love and Loss (2012), the digital-only singles Dreams of the Bell Tower Watchman (2025),  The Distant Horizon (2024), eleven:eleven (2020), The Dark Outside, The Light Within (2019), Better Girl (2018), Watchers and Holy Ones (2017), We’ll All Go Together (2016) and Downtown Train (2015) and their earlier (pre-Summer) debut Go Negative. All titles are available on Slugg Records.