Through her work as a songwriter, musician, tattooer and fine artist, Salt Lake City‘s Jill Whit has developed a far-reaching yet comprehensive artistic practice rooted in intimacy. But the focus has rarely been as personal as it has this past year. The opening months of the pandemic brought solitude, and with it a newfound focus on the self. What emerged from the period is time is being, a brand new record to be released this spring on Orindal Records.
Entirely self-recorded, the album strives to create the most fertile conditions in which to explore one’s interior state, blending the lo-fi sensibilities of bedroom pop with elements of ambient to form the bedrock upon which Whit’s lyricism and spoken-word poetry can flourish. While the release is at least in part formed around the dissolution of a relationship, it inverts its focus, rejecting the traditional outward gaze of longing.
“The album is really an exploration into the body,” Jill Whit explains, “It’s about knowing yourself through solitude – gaining a connection to your physical body. It relates to opening up to your inner voice, and connecting the body and spirit through physical and emotional movement; to be ever accepting, shifting, breathing, living, being.”
Today, we’re excited to unveil time is being‘s first two singles, combined into one video by Shey Allen. ‘Touchless’ introduces the solitude of the record, crafting a space made dreamlike in the static aftermath of love. The only sensation is the phantom contact of those left behind, the only movement some residual disturbance that quietly pulls at the air. Whit’s poetry emerges plainspoken, deepened by the subtlest echo that plays like hearing your own words return from tiled walls. If there is coldness or solitude to the track, it is encapsulated in this resonance. The sense that, within such a scene, life can only arise from within.
Though written amid the dying embers of the relationship, ‘Maybe Means No’, is a natural progression from the previous track. Contemplating fleeing the present for new time and space, the song works up the courage to make a decision, growing brighter as it edges over the precipice of hesitancy into freefall. The drop might be sudden, the song suggests, and must be experienced alone, but there is feeling in such a descent. A reminder of your body—in gravity, in resistance, in sheer movement. A rekindling of possibility in the prospect of starting anew.
Through a solo dance performance from Rachel Andes, the video taps into this tactile sensibility and captures the contradictions running through the songs. Starting within the porcelain white confines of a bathroom, and concluding in a desert’s expanse of red rock. Surroundings that mimic the evolving soundscape, where intimacy and loneliness lose their firm divide, and physicality can triumph over empty space.
Cover photo by Joshua Doss