#orindal

[dustedmagazine]

bobbie — Lessons (Orindal)

bobbie’s songs coalesce out of stardust, bright pinpoints of synth sound twinkling against a velvety dark backing of narcotic vocals, guitar strums and the steady thump of drums. The songwriter, bobbie shuster, breathes soft phrases into the mic, their voice quickly swallowed by an iridescent hum. The music soothes and envelopes. It is very calming and very beautiful.

bobbie comes from Northampton, MA, just down the road, part of that community’s freak-folk scene. They made one record before this one, 2003’s Rhododendron on locally based Flower Sounds. The song, “Rhododendron” turns up late in this second record’s sequencing, sounding notably more defined and emphatic than the rest of the material, with ricocheting snare shots and the burble of psych guitar. So, perhaps bobbie is letting the forms blur a little at this stage in their career, turning hazy songs into rapturous atmospherics, as on slow-dawning “I Could Call You,” with its trebly sparkle and tidal undercurrent of swelling sounds.

bobbie plays an Omnichord on these songs, a lesser-used instrument akin to a synthesized autoharp. The shimmer of folky autoharp transmutes itself into interstellar vibrations, giving bobbie’s music a lulling dream-pop sound. The artist’s partner in all this, engineer Felix Walworth of the band Florist, animates these effervescences with percussion. His drumming pushes even ephemeral cuts into slow, nodding motion.

And yet, there’s real pleasure to be had in watching these cuts take shape like pictures in the clouds, the swell of electronic sounds accumulating into melodies, then sputtering out like sparkler trails. The title track follows a clean, slumberous melody through magical forests of tone; the point is not so much the construction of the song as the entrancing spaces it moves through. 

Jennifer Kelly

[abductionradiation]

Chicago, IL -- I fell in love with Gia Margaret hard last year when I listened to her 2018 album There’s Always Glimmer for the first time. And I am so excited for her sophomore album Mia Gargaret to come out on June 12 via Orindal Records (psst, you should pre-order the album on Bandcamp this Friday, May 1). Ahead of the album’s release, Gia Margaret shared two songs this week “Apathy” and “Body”. 

You’ll notice that she doesn’t sing on these two tracks and that they’re mostly just instrumentals. Gia Margaret explains: “After having to cancel tours because of illness, I was unable to sing for nearly half of the year. This left me feeling like a shell of myself, so I turned to my synthesizer for comfort. These compositions helped me hold onto my identity as a music maker. At times this music helped soothe my anxiety more than therapy or anything else could.”

As with a lot of the core songwriting on There’s Always Glimmer, “Apathy” and “Body” have a sparkle of wonder to them while still feeling grounded and serene. Gia Margaret’s skills as an instrumentalist shine on these two tracks and it’s just a taste of what’s to come on Mia Gargaret. 

Connect with Gia Margaret:

Facebook | Twitter | Instagram

[kibunandnunchi]

Tour is in the works <3

[dustedmagazine]

TJO — Songs for Peacock (Orindal)

Songs for Peacock by TJO

Tara Jane O’Neil has always had a way of finding deep emotional resonance in wispy, ephemeral sounds, her songs built out of fog and shadows yet providing a surprisingly solid place to stand. Reviewing her 2014 Where Shine New Lights, Lucas Schleicher called her songs, “skeletal, bittersweet and exquisitely quiet.” But what if her songs are new wave chestnuts and 1980s mega-hits? Can they shimmer with the same ghostly light? Sometimes, but not always. TJO’s 1983-centric mix tape dedicated to her brother Brian, who died in 2019, works sporadically on material from Boy George, Bananarama and Siouxsie and the Banshees, but even TJO can’t save Cher’s “Believe.”

These are not all exactly covers – some are glancing meditations that provide only brief glimpses of ultra-popular source material. “Borderline Intro” barely teases the synth pop, gate-reverbed drumming opening of Madonna’s early hit, while “Everything Counts” makes only brief contact with the Depeche Mode song it references. Aztec Camera’s “Oblivious” is decocted into the barest essence of its guitar line and colored over with drum machine. The songs are in TJO’s head more than in the music itself, touchstones briefly tapped and discarded.

Fuller, longer re-imaginings are easier to recognize, but even they bear TJO’s imprint. Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer,” one of 1983’s ubiquitous singles, turns strange and chilly in her interpretation, its peppy marimba riff sinking into haunted, rueful refrains. Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” comes in on tick-tocking drum machine beat and vampire castle synth foreboding. Cohen sang it with a brash worldly-ness; he was in on the joke and not expecting much better. TJO sings softly, distantly, as if from the other side of reality, as if the world had already done its worst and won.

The biggest hit that TJO considers is Cher’s massive “Believe,” an unusually dance-pop entry in Cher’s catalogue and one of the earlier pop songs to make extensive use of autotune. TJO pays her homage in autotune as well, albeit a fragile, whispery autotune that sounds like it’s coming in from another planet. And yet, it’s not a very good song, certainly not good enough to strip down to its acoustic underwear like this.

Indeed, that’s the problem with the whole collection, that these are disposable pop songs mostly, not really worthy of an artist like TJO however fondly she recalls them. TJO’s artist statement makes it clear that this is a very personal project, mostly a way to remember her brother (she calls it “good medicine”), and it’s hard to criticize on that basis. But yeesh, some of these songs.

Jennifer Kelly

[dustedmagazine]

Ruth Garbus — Kleinmeister (Orindal Records)

Photo by Annie Flanagan

Kleinmeister by Ruth Garbus

In 2017, Ruth Garbus started taking voice lessons from Jim Anderson, a German opera singer transplanted in Garbus’s now hometown of Brattleboro, Vermont. His lessons studded by his favorite exclamation, “Think beauty!,” Garbus also notes how Anderson continuously provided images to help stretch “the voice and mind” of his students, phrases like (as paraphrased by Ruth): “imagining the inside of my skull and my soft palate is like a famous European opera house.”

Of course, Ruth’s intimate vocals and imaginative lyrics pre-date these lessons. But the production of Kleinmeister, recorded on two-inch tape at Guilford Sound in Vermont, clears the DIY fog of past records and the clarity brings her vocal explorations and lyrical concepts to the fore, seemingly emboldened with a new confidence. Short and articulate poetic phrasings are more likely to catch your ear. A phrase like “Adirondack littering,” which ends “Pitiful Poetry,” feels equally like an unadulterated sound-based utterance, as if Garbus massaged the phrase from the back of her cheek on the spot, and like Garbus had been sitting on the phrase for years, waiting to place it in the right place. Poised yet uninhibited, Ruth’s voice makes you believe it’s somehow both.

Sympathetic with Shintoism’s animist inklings, Garbus has a passion for giving life to lifeless materials and reminding us that the liveliest scenarios are still composed of matter and applied meaning. Opener “Strash” takes inspiration from Elizabeth Royte’s book Garbage Land, an extended look at the human waste and its many tributaries. Garbus threads together sensual lyrics, elaborating a dimension of performance over intimate sequences (“coming on a stage covered in roses and poppies/rooted in the sand covering our ancient plastic toys”), with illustrious lyrics that paint the extended life of waste (“plasticated paper and popsicle sticks covered in algae” or “insurmountable heaps, hot and green”). Garbus uses her animist explorations to make intimate scenarios seem distant and to magnify the importance of excess that skips our minds, an effective way of accentuating the current fucked environmental state.

Each of the songs on Kleinmeister is accompanied by Ruth’s guitar, either steeped in a flanger effect and tapped on, or softly strummed with little effect. Garbus’s voice navigates melody and inflection the way something does in a world much larger than itself, full of thought, instinct, and feeling. Her compositions will occasionally take clean turns, quickly and casually, that provide stunning moments, but mostly you’ll be taken by the carefully articulated melodies. A stride away from both perceived and imagined, her lyrics remain vivid however the themes end up breaking. She has both the crisp and vibrant feel of early Fairport Convention, and in parts, the near sprawling folk interplay that makes Joanna Newsom’s work seem as much extended improvisation as intricate composition. Kleinmeister fulfills its German namesake both in translation, “Little Masters,” and its reference to the highly detailed prints from the 16th century German group.

Ian Forsythe

[dustedmagazine]

Greg Jamie — Across a Violet Pasture (Orindal)

The songs on Across a Violet Pasture flicker and haunt, a tracery of voice and strummed guitar etching patterns on shifting textures of synth wash, the physical slap and punch of drums subsumed under echoing shimmer.  That should come as no surprise, really, since Greg Jamie has long been steeped in folk’s eeriest, most gothic traditions. He played through the aughts and teens with o’death and as a solo act since then.  His one previous album under his own name, Crazy Town, came out in 2018. 

Jamie is a visual artist and filmmaker, too, so you can make out fleeting imagery and narrative threads amid hovering sonics.  His music has the same unearthly playfulness as Chad Van Gaalen’s song, an artifact, perhaps, of thinking in pictures. 

The spectral quality emerges from plain-spoken instrumentation, like the ghosts that might turn up in old photographs of staid, 19th century burghers.  “Distant Shore,” for instance, makes use of a trebly, diffident strumming, a mandolin perhaps, as it spins out its vocal melody.  There’s nothing especially strange about either element, but the pitch and echo give the sense of a spiritual opening.  The ordinary world lives right next to the fantastical in these songs. 

“I Wanted More” is swathed in electric guitar overtones, its plaintive singing wreathed in auditory uncertainty.  The melody, though, is strong enough to win out, cresting effortlessly over the murk and mystery.  It’s a cut that might remind you of Damien Jurado’s run with Richard Swift, grounded but full of wonder. 

Jamie is centered in folk, never more so than in the droning, plinking, modal “Time Has a Way,” a Brit-folk lament that slants, sometimes towards the Middle East.  “When I Die” has the same trudging, ritual propulsion, a slow march towards epiphany, or, perhaps, oblivion.  “When I die, I die with the flowers,” Jamie sings, poking at the old questions of why we’re here and where we’re going, as folk artists have done forever.  Yet the mystery is fresh and close and present, in music that lets the spiritual into this world and vice versa. 

Jennifer Kelly

[dustedmagazine]

Kristin Daelyn — Beyond the Break (Orindal)

Philadelphian Kristin Daelyn fits quite well into her city’s acid folk heritage, recalling Meg Baird as she picks delicate lattices of shimmering guitar and floats elegiac melodies way up into the stratosphere. The singer-songwriter once recorded as Delv and, after that, released Gardens & Plantings under her own name in 2021. This latest, the first for Orindal, reins in the electronic atmospheres that the artist’s pandemic era album included, and brings in like minded players, Dan Knishkowy of Adeline Hotel on acoustic guitar and Danny Black of Good Old War on various instruments: steel guitar, bass, percussion and baritone guitar. Patrick Riley managed the string arrangements, threading lush loops of violin and cello through Daelyn’s pristine gardens of sound.

The guitar work is subtle and emotive, pulsing delicately just below the surface of these vocally-driven songs. You can hear two of them—Daelyn and Knishkowy, presumably—dancing together in cuts like “It Came to Me Then,” as one sketches out the measures with a regular thrum and the other swings out in subtle arcs and curves and flourishes around it. Yet however fine the playing might be, and make no mistake it is very fine, it recedes behind the purity of Daelyn’s vocal tone. In “Wanted,” for instance, the guitar takes on a low, percussive tone, keeping time mostly, but with little filaments. But the singing swings out wide in oscillating “oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-ohs,” and octave vaulting leaps, in plain spare solo mode or subtly shadowed by harmonies.

The title track is a stringed-instrument mingling, two flurries of picking meeting an elastic arc of steel guitar. Daelyn allows this instrumental conversation to develop, letting each instrument whisper its secrets, then slip into the mix. There are no words at all, but you get a sense of different viewpoints or maybe spirits, stating complimentary ideas. Words play a larger role elsewhere, as on the song “Patience Comes to the Bones,” which is based on a poem by Mary Oliver. The lyrics are elusive, juxtaposing the urge to hold on with the need to let go, though of what or whom, it’s hard to say.  “I held it all with my hands/Twisting and turning to bend/Anything turned into something I held on too tightly/A longing that floats over me/And opens my palms lets me breath,” sings Daelyn, as a low stringed instrument throbs. She lands lightly on the words and pauses to let their mysteries sink in.

These eight songs are artfully recorded, allowing each sound, whether voice or guitar or plaintive fiddle, to bloom and resonate. The tones overlap but never in a muddle. You can follow each element through to the end, and a clarity envelops every sound. These are songs of deceptive simplicity, skillfully made and ably performed. If you need more beauty in your life, and who doesn’t, why not check out Beyond the Break?

Jennifer Kelly

[dustedmagazine]

Boduf Songs — Abyss Versions (Orindal)

Abyss Versions by Boduf Songs

The hushed acoustic dread of Mat Sweet’s Boduf Songs returns after a brief flirtation with electronics. Abyss Versions is much more in line with the minimalist goth of Sweet’s earliest recordings, the 2005 self-titled debut or the following year’s Lion Devours the Sun.  This seventh full length is quiet and deadly chilling, a retrenchment after 2015’s Stench of Exist, of which I observed that “moody synth textures and blipping, buzzing electronic elements turn Sweet’s existential inquiries into something gleaming, futuristic and engrossing.”

This time Sweet’s songs are stripped bare and trembling, just a whistle of atmosphere, a tangle of guitar picking, a few lucid notes of bass separate them from whispery nakedness.  Existential angst binds the album together — it begins in a vortex and ends in a void — not just thematically but with a palpable shiver. Sweet’s verses have are alienated, evocative, full of murmured violence.  “The skies are filled with a light that shines from mouths wide open in screams and sighs,” he confides in the opening stanza of “Gimme Vortex” and if you can imagined a scream that is sighed you’ve got the main disquieting tone Abyss Versions.  

You might compare what Sweet’s doing with Nicholas John Talbot’s Gravenhurst, the late, wonderfully haunted folk project whose cool toned loveliness masked extremes of horror, despair and dystopia.  Boduf songs has the same spectral gorgeousness, the same grave-scented equanimity, as if all the events in Sweet’s softly chanted lyrics have been settled years and years ago.  Listen, for instance, to how “Sword Weather” takes shape out of humming, trembling vocal textures, a bee hive of sonics framed in acoustic guitar picking, shrouded in cicada-ish electronics, and yet which is fundamentally one isolated lonely voice, musing on how “fingers break, flowers fall.”  

When Sweet experimented with denser, more jubiliant textures on his last album four years ago, it worked reasonably well, but this hushed intensity feels truer and closer to his core.  Let the chill run down your spine, let the melancholy linger, Abyss Versions speaks to your quietest, deepest doubts.  

Jennifer Kelly