Tag: Outside Music

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Canadian Poet and Singer/Songwriter Jenny Berkel Shares Meditative and Gorgeous “Kaleidoscope”

Jenny Berkel is a Canadaian poet, singer/songwriter and guitarist. The past couple of years have been busy for Berkel: her debut chapbook Grease Dogs was published last June through Baseline Press. She also wrote and released her sophomore album, last year’s Pale Moon Kid.

Berkel’s third album These Are The Sounds Left from Leaving is slated for a May 13, 2022 release through Outside Music. These Are The Sounds Left from Leaving will reportedly showcase the perspective of a unique storyteller whose work is centered around relatable introspection: Each song on the album is set in the micro-world of a keen feeling observer, trying to parse a mindful moment in a mad, mad, mad world in which it feels impossible to gleam truth — a post-Trump, heavily gaslit world where perceptions of reality are hopelessly distorted.

“I wrote the album in a tiny apartment, at a time when everything felt big and overwhelming,” Berkel says in press notes. She was living in a brownstone walk-up full of radiant light and the omnipresent sound of a leaky bathtub faucet. It was a sudden move at the time — a spontaneous departure from touring, bustling city life, being many things to many people — that landed the Canadian poet and singer/songwriter in a space of self-imposed stillness.

“The songs themselves are a study of proximity, bringing big fears into small spaces,” the Canadian artist explains in press notes. “They’re intimate examinations of a world that often overwhelms.”

These Are The Sounds Left from Leaving was recorded live off the floor at The Sugar Shack and was co-produced by Dan Edmons, Ryan Boldt and Berkel. The album features guest spots from critically acclaimed folk duo Kacy & Clayton, and string arrangements by Colin Nealis. “I wanted the songs to feel like living creations that capture a living moment,” Berkel says. “I wanted that theme of big fears in small spaces to be heard and felt as a coexistence of intimacy and menacing permeability.”

“Kaleidoscope,” the album’s first single is a lush and meditative song featuring an arrangement of soaring strings, glistening acoustic guitar, gently padded drumming, twinkling piano and Berkel’s gorgeous and expressive vocal singing lyrics with a novelist’s attention to detail — both physical and psychological. And as a result, the song feels dizzyingly intimate yet cinematic.

Thematically, the song is a poetic consideration of the importance of care and precision in language, both in the broader political landscape and in intimate emotional ways. From the heart-wrench confusion of interpersonal manipulation, the song and its narrator extrapolate a collectively felt disorientation at the kaleidoscopic swirling of disinformation, misinformation and lies.

Directed by Meg Hubley, the accompanying video stars Jenny Berkel and Mads Higgins is a cinematic fever dream that features Berkel in a tiny bedroom set up, alternating between watching herself on TV, opening a luggage crate, from which a clown-like doppleganger — starred by Higgins — pops out. Higgins’ character manipulates Berkel in various ways throughout the video.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Beliefs Dark and Moody Cabaret-Inspired Visuals for “1994”

Although they’ve gone through a series of lineup changes and are currently constituted as a duo featuring its founding members and primary songwriters Jesse Crowe and Josh Korody, the Toronto, ON-based indie rock duo Beliefs have released two well-regarded full-length albums over the course of their seven years together — 2013’s self-titled debut and 2015’s Leaper; but the band can trace their origins to a shared love of late 80s and early 90s noise pop and shoegaze. Interestingly, the Canadian duo’s forthcoming third full, length effort Habitat was produced and engineered by the band’s Josh Korody and mixed by Holy Fuck’s Graham Walsh, who’s also mixed albums by Preoccupations, Alvvays and METZ, and features Leon Tahenny, who’s played with Austra, Death From Above 1979 and Owen Pallet on drums, finds the band completely destructing, remaking and remodeling their self-conscious shoegazer-like origins in pursuit of an uncompromising new sound in which the duo has stopped being defined by the sum of its influences and finds their own unique voice and sound — and that period can often be one of most exciting and pivotal periods for a band. “I hope that’s the case,” says Crowe. “That’s always how I feel about bands, too – when you listen to something and it seems like it’s leading to a whole other element of a band, when you feel like you’re in the hallway about to open the door to a whole other space that this band is creating. And I hope that that’s what happens with us. We have no real plans at this point. We don’t want to be a ‘shoegaze’ band anymore.”

Interestingly, Habitat was the first time that the band’s founding duo had written an album together, and as Crowe continues, “and we wrote 80% of it in a room in four days wth no previous material. It’s as spontaneous as can possibly be” — with material being derived from extensive jam sessions. Adding to the spontaneous nature of the material, the album was recorded and tracked in 16 days and was recorded with no grand design or plan at play; however, interestingly enough the material manages to be influenced by each individual member’s unique interests and obsessions while gravitating towards unfamiliar instruments and instrumentation. Lately, Korody has had an increasing interest in modular synths and avant industrial  sounds, partially influenced by his solo recording project Nailbiter while Crowe had been listening to a great deal of 90s hip-hop — in particular, Portishead’s Third.  “It’s a dark record, for sure,”  Crowe says of their new album. “I feel like we were drawing a lot more from, like, me being a Goth teenager and Josh only wanting to listen to Aphex Twin and me only wanting to listen to Portishead’s Third for the last year and stuff like that. But also it was time to embody the elements of being a ‘wall-of-sound’ band with some space and the idea of being able to be quiet when you should be quiet, and you can’t do that with three guitars. There’s no space. It just becomes all push and no pull.”

Habitat, the band’s third full-length effort is slated for a September 22, 2017 release through Hand Drawn Dracula Records and Outside Music and the album’s latest single “1994” is reportedly a sort of sequel to Leaper’s “1992” and is a sleek and atmospheric track featuring ominously cascading synths, shimmering and angular guitar chords and propulsive drumming — and while allowing enough room for Crowe’s husky vocals to float and dart around the mix, the track sonically reminds me of Xiu Xiu, Antics-era Interpol, and others but with an eerily spectral vibe; as though the track was possessed by the lingering ghosts of one’s life. And they manage to do so within a song that eschews discernible or traditional song structures; in fact, much like Antics, the song is focused on creating and sustaining a particular mood than whether a chorus should be placed in a particular part of the song or not. 

Produced and edited by Christopher Mills, the video features Crowe and Korody performing in a dark room cabaret style –but the video manages to bear the appearance of old VHS tape, as it possesses a grainy quality in between cuts, nodding at the quality of the video for “1992.”