Patient Hands is the ambient project of songwriter Alex Stooshinoff. Describing himself as a “Russian Doukhobor” (‘spirit-wrestler’) from the Canadian Prairies, Stooshinoff works with a naked vulnerability, pushing past pride in order to get as close to his personal truth as possible. After moving to Montréal in 2015 to pursue a degree in philosophy and electroacoustics, Stooshinoff continued working on his music and earlier this year released a full-length album.
Stoic is an album based around Stooshinoff’s experiences of “year-long sickness, and the warp and weft of mystical experience that ran through it.” Encapsulating the Patient Hands style, the record delved into Stooshinoff’s life by “walk[ing] a line between self-satire and sincerity,” the songs loaded with disarmingly open lyrics that nevertheless maintain a humorous edge (even if the jokes are so personal as to only make sense to the artist himself). “Stoic is a love record,” Stooshinoff concludes in the record’s preface. “It’s about enduring the dark night, and finding the courage to live with an open heart.”
Today we’re thrilled to share ‘Stasis’, the lead single and title track from a forthcoming Patient Hands release. Recorded when Stooshinoff was just 19, Stasis was originally released under the moniker Living Room, though has long since been removed from the internet. After the good reception for Stoic, Stooshinoff is reissuing the album as Patient Hands but not changing anything, allowing the work to stand as a coming-of-age piece crafted from the uncertainty and plastic identity of late adolescence.
The album is autobiographical, from the soundscapes crafted to portray Stooshinoff’s experiences with ayahuasca in the Peruvian Amazon to the use of field recordings of his family together after a funeral, right through to the artwork that features him and his older brother. The sound is therefore authentic, a moving and at times surreal collection of songs that takes lived experience and condenses it into a purer form—a tonic for the listener that proves both cathartic and transportive.
As a single, ‘Stasis’ encapsulates this aesthetic, a lush and textured sound that is at once morose and affirming. Taken at face value, the song serves as an interesting exploration of the confusing space of youth, where one’s path and position within a family is yet to be decided. That the song is being re-released after several years gives the sound another aspect too, lifting it beyond the moment to become a reckoning with the past. Any considered engagement with what we were or what we thought we might be is always bittersweet, gladness, nostalgia and sorrow blended into one.
