CMJ Showcase Spotlight: Enchanting Los Angeles duo Smoke Season light up our party

This is the seventh — and final! — in a week-long series of spotlights on the bands and artists performing at our CMJ party with Berklee College of Music this Friday, October 24 at Carroll Place in New York City. Seven Berklee-affiliated acts will participate in Boston & Beyond, an official CMJ Music Marathon showcase that is free to badgeholders and open to the general public (RSVP here). Doors are at 8 p.m. and the show runs until after 1 a.m. More info can be found here and here. To listen to all the participating bands, fire up our Soundcloud playlist.

Smoke Season, 12:30 a.m. set time

When we first started planning our CMJ party with Berklee College of Music several weeks ago, one band from the opposite side of the country jumped out at us right off the bat. It was Smoke Season, a magnetic Los Angeles duo featuring singer-songwriter Gabrielle Wortman of TEMP3ST and the Honor Society multi-instrumentalist Jason Rosen. Their atmospheric, love-worn electronic-pop defied any sort of simple categorization. We called it “seductive” and brought it back to the bedroom.

After the duo released their new video for “Opaque” earlier this month, we knew their involvement would cement our showcase as one of CMJ’s hottest tickets. Gushed LA Weekly about the video when premiering it: “It’s a bizarre love triangle that fans of Banks and Sylvan Esso won’t be able to stop watching.”

We can’t stop listening, either.

Smoke Season’s recent Hot Coals Cold Souls EP is a dynamic turn of passionate pop music, each sound possessing its own rightful place in an alluring cocktail of emotive, dusky sounds. We feel like the world will wake up to these fancy cats after their run of CMJ shows, which concludes with us tomorrow night. Smoke Season close out the party, so don’t worry if you’re late — they’re on at New York o’clock. And when they’re on, so are you.

Listen to some tunes below…