The work of Los Angeles-based artist Gabriel Brenner first rose to our attention with absent, just dust, an EP released under the moniker Pastel that introduced his ability to knit a variety of genres into something intensely personal yet monolithic in scope. The record was “beautiful and unnerving,” we described, “both harsh and delicate, the wide open soundscapes charged with echo and hum, the air vibrating with remnants of past trauma.” Such a dichotomous style is the binding quality of Brenner’s craft. His insistence on placing seemingly opposing forces side by side. The noise and silence of absent, just dust, the terror and beauty of single ‘Moon Landing‘, songs that broach the constant tension between things and the emergence of multifarious consequences.
Now recording as G. Brenner, this summer sees Brenner once again team up with Very Jazzed for a brand new album, Brushfire, and today sees the release of a lead single of the same name. Described as the “thesis statement” of the album, the track emerges quietly, a soft hymn supported by nothing but subtle ambient textures. But stark keys emerge, then an insidious shimmer and glitch, and with them the realisation of the coalescing dread. “Santa Ana’s racing through my yard,” Brenner sings. “Watching homes turn into flames / Wonder if my body’s burning up / In a room I lay awake.” What had passed for peace is revealed to be anything but, the fatalist’s brief serenity before the final fall. Brenner sits in California, and California is on fire.
Yet as the ashes fill his lungs and his ribs disintegrate, something emerges. Call it a vision, a dream. An alternate space and time where things are different, and human needs might be met. A place where all that America denies and destroys might be allowed to breathe, where the air itself is not alight. The soaring moment is interrupted by the flames at the door. The intense and cruel present leaving no time for imagination.
Such a realisation is central to ‘Brushfire’. The peculiar sadness of a present so immediate it prevents us from envisioning a future. A grief so strong it registers even as the flames rise and the air turns to soot. The sensation is palpable in Brenner’s final lines, the words giving way to silence before a radio sample rises in the background. A voice quick and desperate, stripped down to sheer reportage in the face of a violence so complete it almost becomes sublime.
The song is accompanied by a video, which Brenner co-directed with co-directed with Amara Higuera Hopping.
Photos by Amara Higuera Hopping, artwork by Hopping and Gabriel Brenner