Based in Toronto (Tkaronto), Gillian Stone is a multi-instrumentalist, ethnomusicologist and interdisciplinary artist who draws from ambient, post-rock and folk to create her vocally-driven style. Stone was raised on the traditional territory of the Quw’utsun on Vancouver Island and possesses Icelandic heritage, and both informing the sonic worlds of her music. Her art looks for new ways to explore experiences of mental health struggles and addiction and destigmatise such phenomena through art.
Following previous single ‘Shelf’, a song which also saw Gillian Stone make her directorial debut with a video made with Toronto filmmaker John M. Hall, she is back with a brand new single, ‘Amends’. Again deepening the folk style with ambient and post-rock sensibilities, the song holds a weightless quality in its opening, levitating with a strange dreaminess in part thanks to the work of multi-instrumentalist Michael Peter Olsen (Zoon). Though as the track progresses and Spencer Cole’s drums kick in, a newfound heft emerges, as though the various layers coalesce into something chaotic yet grounded in weighty truth.
The song focuses on the anger stage of grief, acknowledging the power of naming in overcoming personal issues. “It is a fearless moral inventory, an understanding of the effect on self and other, an odyssey through four and five of The Twelve Steps,” Stone explains. “My recovery journey has been riddled with shame that still lives in my bones. The final line of the song, ‘regret is a wily muse, but I’ll name it out loud’, is an attempt to exorcize this shame from my body. By acknowledging the ruins of my Anger, I am attempting to destroy the destroyer.”
I felt you under my breath,
growling, mewling in my chest.
A fountain of youth I whetted then left.
Regret is a wily muse, but I’ll name it out
loud.
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The video is again directed by Gillian Stone and John M. Hall, with photography by Hall and photographer Joel Gale. “A movement piece that conveys my body in fragments,” as Stone describes, “drawing from the concept of the Split Self in Internal Family Systems. It builds into a cathartic somatic experience as I dance to fuse myself back together.” Check it out below:
‘Amends’ is out now and is available from the Gillian Stone Bandcamp page.
Album photography by Joel Gale and assisted by Danielle Fried