Julius Smack is multidisciplinary Los Angeles artist & musician Peter Hernández, and is the founder of influential emergent queer artist community Practical Records. His latest and most mature effort Serenity involves vaporous textures and pastel-hued vistas, epic marimba and saxophone miniatures, frenetic pop songs, and long-form ambient landscapes. Kitschy MIDI instruments and glitchy effects produce something akin to a fantasy collaboration between Oneohtrix Point Never and Arthur Russell, or perhaps an outtake from a Yasuaki Shimizu & Carl Stone collaboration.
In performance, Julius is known for his vogue-inspired postmodern dance that traverses time, genre, and artistic disciplines looking for what he describes as the “truth and beauty that lies in between.” Written and produced in the early days of the pandemic, “Serenity” is where grief and hope commingle in a dark soundscape.
"Serenity centers the active processes at play in the process of healing. During the first summer of the pandemic, I was grieving the loss of my uncle to alcoholism while participating in support groups that promoted the “Serenity Prayer.” “Serenity" is a queering of that sentiment that invites my indigenous ancestors, Buddhist ideas of non-attachment, butterflies and dragonflies as talismans for our collective healing.
" - Julius Smack