As we described in a preview back in January, the music of Half Shadow lives up to its name. The recording project of Portland, Oregon‘s Jesse Carsten, Half Shadow makes songs “carved from the boundary between light and dark,” we wrote, “excavating this space of all its esoteric substance and becoming as intimate as they are strange.” Latest album At Home With My Candles, a joint release between Bud Tapes, Dove Cove Records and Illusion Florist Records, looks to develop this style into something even deeper and more mysterious. The album was recorded at home during quarantine but pushes beyond this domestic space. As though a close engagement with the smallest, most modest environment can lead to surreal places. Pushing through to some expansive other side.
The sound which emerges is at once intimate and far-reaching, what we described on single ‘Song for the Garden’ as “an uncanny marriage between personal insight and a wider mystical experience.” The mood is right there in the title. An environment quiet and half-lit but also cathedralesque, some latent mystery lurking not only in the shadowy corners but within the flames themselves.
Inspired by the work of surrealist Leonora Carrington, opener ‘Inn of the Dawn Horse’ pitches the listener straight into this world. A track build upon natural textures, Carsten’s delivery remains reflective and hushed. Though against this quiet rises Yaara Valey’s flugelhorn, like some invading force which knocks the track spinning from its natural rhythm into something erratic and odd. “My hollow hand looms, conducting visions unmade, absolute,” Carsten sings in the fitting final line, “and I’m at the root now, I’m at the root somehow / with all your visions echoing inside my little wooden room.”
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The record is full of such songs. What Carsten calls “mythopoetic paeans to the domestic uncanny” which, as with Carrington’s paintings, present reality with extra dimensions superimposed. Half Shadow’s songs could be called poems, or perhaps spells or charms, incantations delivered into quiet spaces to summon strange and nameless things. Be this literal, as in ‘In My Room (A Creature Approaches)’ (“in my room,” Carsten sings, “a creature / a hidden creature / approaches”), or more oblique, as with tracks like ‘The Very Eye of the Night’ or ‘I Practice Dying (in the Spare Room)’.
Today sees the release of a brand new video for another such track, ‘A Full Day Spent (Between the Worlds)’. The song was born of a chance encounter, originating from a piece of text found on scrap paper at the back of a draw and evolving into what Cartsen calls a “mysterious travelogue into the unknown.” A recorded memento of a journey into a space eerie and pastoral. The video employs medieval imagery to capture this bucolic mood, though its wry tone and green-screen backdrops adds an uncanny edge once more, and feeds into the central question of the record itself. “How does one find themselves in the house,” Carsten asks in the closing lines, “when on every door comes a ceaseless knocking that refuses to stop?”
At Home With My Candles is out now via Bud Tapes, Dove Cove Records and Illusion Florist Records and you can grab it from the Half Shadow Bandcamp page.
