The story of the obscure ’90s shoegaze, slowcore, or emo band that goes viral decades later and launches a comeback is becoming an increasingly common phenomenon (shoutout Duster, Panchiko, and of course the OGs American Football), and, apparently, Jane Remover has a fictional “band” called Venturing whose (again, fictional) story is exactly that. Stereogum points to a Venturing “bio” on RateYourMusic, which reads:
Venturing is a fictional Indie Rock band created by Jane Remover that formed in small-town Britton, South Dakota (pop. 1,215), a brief 15-minute drive from another small town in South Dakota: Newark. However, Jane Remover hails from the larger, more well-known Newark, New Jersey.
The quintet Venturing was supposedly active from 1990 to 2002 and consisted of the fictional members Melanie (vocals), Fawn (guitar), Daisy (guitar), Barney (bass), and Steve (drums). The band was fairly well-known in the Great Plains / Upper Midwest region, gaining recognition with a couple of unspecified hit songs.
Their musical repertoire includes songs that reference South Dakota. “Aberdeen Dream Sequence” references Britton’s nearest city, Aberdeen, South Dakota, while “(605) 114-1010” cites South Dakota’s area code.
According to lore, Jane Remover (within this fictional piece, using the alias Violet) “discovered” this group when she found one of the band’s T-shirts in her mom’s room. Violet occasionally uploads some of the band’s hard-to-find back catalog as she locates individual songs, in part by purportedly crowdsourcing through her followers. However, all of the band’s releases are, in fact, the work of Jane Remover.
This is all coming up today because Venturing just announced their debut album, Ghostholding, due February 14 via deadAir, whose announcement confirms that all songs were written, recorded, produced and mixed by Jane Remover. Two of the album’s singles, “Halloween” and “Sister,” were already out, and a third, “Famous Girl,” came out today. They’re all very clearly the work of Jane Remover, all spacey, shoegazey indie rock songs with Jane’s unmistakable, electronically-effected voice in the forefront, and they’re all very good. Listen below.
Tracklist
01 “Play my guitar”
02 “No sleep”
03 “Believe”
04 “Guesthouse”
05 “Spider”
06 “Recoil”
07 “Something has to change”
08 “Dead forever”
09 “We don’t exist”
10 “Sick/relapse”
11 “Famous girl”
12 “Halloween”
13 “Sister”