Tag: Mirror

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Stimmerman Shares Eerie “Mirror”

Eva Lawitts is a New York-based singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer, grizzled local scene veteran and JOVM mainstay: Lawitts began her career with a 14-year run with local, prog rock shredders Sister Helen. Since Sister Helen’s break-up, she has developed a reputation as a go-to session and touring musician, working with Vagabon, Princess Nokia, and others.

Lawitts aslo co-runs Brooklyn-based recording studio, Wonderpark Studios, where she’s a producer and engineer. Adding to a busy schedule, the Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer played bass on Oceanator‘s Things I Never Said. 

Her recording project Stimmerman — which is simultaneously a band and a solo project — was founded back in 2017 after her previous band Sister Helen split up. “I wanted a project that was all mine and so I picked a family name long-changed for the purposes of assimilating into American Society (what a concept)- Stimmerman,” Lawitts explains in press notes. 

Lawitts’ Stimmerman debut, 2019’s Goofballs which featured “It Shows” and “Dentist vs. Pharmacist.” was ” . . . more or less about loss and survivor’s guilt: it’s a meditation on a friend’s fatal overdose at a young age through that lens.”

Lawitts’ latest album Undertaking is slated for a May 26, 2023 release through Worry Records. The album reportedly sees Lawitts further cementing her reputation for creating boundary pushing work inspired by an eclectic array of music that aims to hold a cathartic space for the listener/audience.

Undertaking‘s latest single “Mirror” is built around a brooding and eerie production featuring twinkling keys paired with sparse skittering beats, swirling guitar textures and Lawitts’ comforting and self-aware crooning. While “Mirror” sonically brings a sleek synthesis of Beacon and Sylvan Esso with a playful nod to lullabies, the song lyrically is an self-aware yet unvarnished and unafraid baring of the soul — and its deepest desires and thoughts.

The accompanying video for “Mirror” was animated and edited by Max McDaniel-Neff features footage of bodies of water with line drawings depicting the song’s lyrics superimposed over the water.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Los Angeles’ Gal Pal Shares Lush, Dream-like “Mirror”

Rising Los Angeles-based trio Gal Pal — Emelia Austin (she/her), Shayna Hahn (she/her) and Nico Romero (he/him) — can trace their origins back to a serendipitous meeting in college: The members of the band lived in the same dorm and on the same floor. Each member was drawn to to other by a sense of shared ambition and a desire to play music in a share that felt nonjudgmental and generative. Their initial collaborations were improvisatory, long-winded and playful — and featured recently purchased equipment, including a drum kit no one yet knew how to play. “We were learning our instruments together,” Gal Pal’s Nico Romero says. “The project started from wanting to learn how to play an write songs with other people.”

 The Los Angeles-based trio’s latest single “Mirror” altering their creative process — perhaps out of necessity: Austin, Hahn and Romero experimented with writing in isolation, crafting songs with lyrics on their own before bringing them to the group. Featuring production assistance from Danny Noguieras and Sami Perez, the new single is also a bold step forward sonically for the band: Centered around an intricate, looping guitar riff, skittering drum patterns paired with Austin’s plaintive wailing “Mirror” is a shoegazey take on post punk that evokes both the sensation of being hopelessly stuck in a repetitive, dysfunctional pattern — and the slow-burning sense of dread, because there’s the acknowledgement of being stuck, and not knowing how to get out of a hellish loop.

The bands Emelia Austin explains that the song “formed from Nico playing cynical guitar riffs over and over again. It helped me form the theme of being stuck in a pattern. I then wrote lyrics that were cut-off sentences, repeating again and again to express that feeling. For me, ‘Mirror’ is about the ways we allow our identities to be misshaped by people in our lives, how we are used as reflections for others, and the anxiety over being able to control it or not.” 

Directed by Will Rydall, the accompanying video follows the band performing in their sun-bathed practice space, in front of various mirrors — and bounding up and around the surrounding hills.