Julia-Sophie - 'y?'

By Phillipe Roberts

If you’re not a member of the COVID truther brigade tainting the air with hoax logic, space–physical, mental, and emotional–has been incredibly hard to find during lockdown. You’ve picked up at least trace amounts of social anxiety that no amount of brain-picking nasal swabs can totally soothe, and the first thing you’ll notice about anyone on the street is the presence or absence of a mask. Distance is safety. Hurry back to the nervous bubble and scrub off the outside.

Enter the microverse of y?, the debut EP from UK singer/producer Julia-Sophie and your personal escape hatch into endless open space. Clocking in at a bite-sized fourteen minutes, y? dives deep in search of emotional truths, unraveling and savoring each feeling with spellbinding patience. Soothing without neglecting the complex, violent honesty that comes with setting yourself free, these tunes breathe life into solitude. Stuck inside or masking up, this is a moment to let your guard down.

Though it’s destined to find its way into the vast chillscape that dominates the playlist world, y? glides to the head of the pack in its surgical use of textured sound to support its blistering lyrical excavations. Opener “breathe” expands and contracts like a lung, flowing from tender verses that cling tightly to a distorted drum rattle before erupting into a cavernous–“with your heart in my hands/I feel safe.” Bits of Julia-Sophie’s voice get lost in space. A sliver of desire–“kiss me”–slips into a brief moment of stillness. “x0x” punches the hardest of any track here. Heartbreaking self-doubt blooms from a flurry of beats that evolve continuously over the track, pressing you forward as the words “nobody wants me here” swirl overhead and a garbled French transmission overwhelms the senses. It’s a panic attack in real time, and you’re strapped in.

After the glittering respite of the interlude “i told you everything”, Julia-Sophie unveils “i left you”, the slow-burning pop gem that should become her calling card. “I try to buy time to be okay tomorrow/ to look inside my mind” hits unreasonably hard, pressed to the front of the mix and decorated only by the nervous ticking of synthesizer blips. Blurry passion is discarded with the ruthless admission “I don’t feel alive enough to call you.” Rather than present a mere snapshot of uncertainty, a portrait of loneliness or disillusionment, “i left you” drags you through all the hope, expectation, and self-annoyance that comes with stunted desire. Without a clear cut victory or loss, it makes up its own mind. Julia-Sophie’s emergence from her day job on the frontlines of synthpop trio Candy Says feels perfectly timed to create more than a space for therapeutic dreaming; y?’s soft curiosity is a gentle reminder to go beyond the pain of self-discovery and explore your own hidden worlds. What emotional spaces are you neglecting? What barriers are you building against the gathering storm of your own feelings? What better time than now to listen deeply? 

Mood Tattooed - No Compromise

Gerard Marcus

Brooklyn-based Mood Tattooed is a musical project which balances elements of electronic synthesis, American folk tendencies, and fluid song structure to create music that sounds free of constraints. Written by singer-songwriter and composer Hagan Knauth, his music is generally melancholic, dealing with themes of both internal and external fear and anxiety. His new music video for “No Compromise” explores these themes visually. Made in collaboration with videographer Matthew Sullivan and artist Margaret Pinto, the video follows an alien being as it explores the forest and small towns of rural upstate New York. The creature is immediately odd juxtaposed against its surroundings. In a statement from the artist, he says he “wanted the creature to appear inefficient and out of place in the landscape,” which gives the character an enjoyable sense of absurdity. As you watch it move through the wilderness of rural upstate New York, it just seems odd, less of an immediate threat than just a confused being clearly in the wrong place. It’s almost funny, until you realize the creature’s mission, which is to collect various objects and eventually abduct a human for a bizarre ritual of unknown purpose (except to the creature performing it). Who or what is this creature? What is it doing here? Should we judge it based off of its absurdity or its actions? There are all good questions with no definite answer, other than to pull it back to themes found in the music. In the words of the artist himself, “perhaps the fact that the creature is simultaneously threatening and laughably absurd is all a metaphor for the little monsters we make in our heads.”

2012 BID ADIEU - SOMETHING TO TELL YOU

By Gerard Marcus

2012 Bid Adieu is a DIY artist collective headed by Jordan Clark and Gray Hall, featuring a lot of our favorite artists in the New York scene. Their output to date has consisted of three singles and two videos which all exude creative experimentation and high levels of musicianship. The new video for “Something To Tell You” keeps that trend alive. The track, fronted by Hall on vocals and guitar, deals with themes of escapism. How do you move on after finding yourself in a situation where remaining would only make things more confusing. The video, directed by Jeff O’neal, helps bring that story to life through creative use of isolation and distortion, with a spotlight on Hall allowing the emotional content of his words shine through. It’s another truly intriguing piece from the New York based collective, and has me very excited for their debut “We Died In 2012: This Is Hell,” set to release Friday, June 7th of this year.

Words from Jordan Clark himself:

As it stands, We Died In 2012: This Is Hell serves an open-letter to the internet set to release Friday, June 7th. “Something To Tell You” is 2012 Bid Adieu’s third single off their debut album. Sung by Gray Hall, “Something To Tell You” is a conversation with someone who the singer no longer has a relationship with. Frustrated and seeking answers that he is not receiving, the singer ultimately knows that he’ll have to leave the situation (“I’ll move to a city”). While 2012 Bid Adieu’s album begins with a more generic look at escapism in the internet-age, "Something To Tell You," the final song on the album, looks at the singer’s own struggles with escapism.

Obvious Creature - Hiding (Video by: Lobo Incognito)

Gerard Marcus

Through all the histories I’ve read in my short time here on earth, I've learned that hiding has been a crucial elements of human survival. Hiding from danger, hiding from the truth, hiding who one really is–it’s a skillset one develops in order to protect or withhold one's personal world from outside influences. As important as hiding has been in the past, it's interesting to think about the modern-day climate of shared information where everything you do is recorded. Nowadays, where can you truly hide? Artist Lobo Incognito takes on this question his video for Obvious Creature’s track “Hiding.”

The video is a mixed collage of found-footage and hand-shot imagery exploring the idea of where we go when we hide. Some of the imagery seems almost voyeuristically intimate, while at other times it is distant and cold. It's the balance of these contrasting elements that Incognito nails beautifully in this video, perfectly capturing the tension of hiding in a modern world where nothing is really secret. Images distort, repeat, and cut to the point where they only fly past as reference. Color change to impossible hues. And digitally-constructed images bend around the analog. Nothing seems stable, and it feels like at any moment all the secrets held within the video will be revealed–but it never happens. Incognito is able to hold it all together with a strong sense of style and aesthetic, teasing at a digital realm where all secrets lie. The video's warped digital style, paired with the chill jazz stylings of the Obvious Creature’s track, creates a dueling experience that breezes through subliminal messages and shows us the reality that today, we all hide in plain sight.

PREMIERE: Walktell - Nonsense

Laura Kerry

Jake Wachtel’s home, he says, is The Open Road. In this spirit, he has adopted the word “walk” in his stage name and many of the sounds he has encountered on his travels into his music. As Walktell, the artist plays kaleidoscopic psych pop that incorporates a wide array of instruments familiar and unfamiliar to most in a Western audience: ukulele, mandolin, sarangi, hulusi, tro, sueng, baglamas, and gunbri, to name a few.

If that list of instruments has left you feeling a little disoriented, you’re now in the right frame of mind to watch Walktell’s new video for his song “Nonsense.” Written in Mumbai and shot in Guangzhou, China, it illustrates the feeling of trying to process the volume of people in the foreign cities around him. Made up of one continuous, lo-fi shot, the video places the viewer in the perspective of the artist as he walks through the masses of commuters in the 14-million-person city. Wachtel’s face dips in and out of the frame, singing listlessly as forges on; the camera pans dizzyingly; and unsuspecting strangers dodge the camera and the tall, curly-haired American man headed their way.

Also disorienting is the Walktell’s version of a lyric video. Though it includes all the lyrics in the right order and timing, the words do more to confuse than guide. This partially results from the words themselves, whose chorus—”Is there any value to nonsense / I couldn't float a flock of fidgeting fibers / But I'll try to assign meaning once again”—might be the most comprehensible string in a song that take great pleasure in playing with the sounds of syllables (“irascible bullies bellowing,” “I can’t keep my cortex courting lies”). The text itself doesn’t help, though; highly stylized in translucent neon, its Ts curl into Bs in lines that dart out of order across the screen. A song about the futility of discovering meaning, “Nonsense” and its video are delightfully bewildering. As Walktell would probably agree, though, there’s joy in the journey.