We’ve featured Mappe Of, the recording project of Toronto-based singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer Tom Meikle, several times in recent months, in preview of new full-length Afterglades. Released by Paper Bag Records, the album continues the ethereal, avant garde style Meikle has developed across previous releases A Northern Star, A Perfect Stone and The Isle of Ailynn, using this evocative and experimental sound to explore the present moment in all of its beauty and precarity. ‘Terraforming Moons’ typifies the style, “a song that takes very personal difficulties and sends them spinning into the cosmos,” as we put it, “a gentle, folk-inflected indie pop song with an almost sci-fi twist,” while ‘A Scourge Laid Upon The Earth’ was even more striking. A starkly weighty song charged with the unfolding environmental calamity around us, as though rising in fury to match the damage being done. “This is in many ways the extinction level event,” as Meikle explains. “It needed to be heavy and raucous, retribution for all of our mistakes.”
The entirety of Afterglades unfolds in this manner. A release as capable of tender emotion as it is scorching rage, and furthermore one unwilling to settle for half measures when the stakes of the moment are so high. Take latest single ‘Obsoloscenic’, written during the earlier days of the mass force feeding of AI, Meikle feeling understandably downbeat about a future. “This song came from trying to find a way to reckon with it, but still see hope through it,” Meikle explains. “It’s still a condemnation of humanity’s choices and our treatment of the earth and its creatures, but there is a through line of optimism in it somewhere. There’s just no other option than to be optimistic in my mind, naive and difficult as it may be.” But make no mistake, this is not an acquiescence to the false promises of the tech industry but something wider and deeper. As Meikle concludes: “Maybe there’s something beautiful about humankind relinquishing control of our machinations and reverting to some purer version of biological existence.”
As I’m watching that red sun a’rising
Beyond horizons
Brushing off a teary cheek
Guess there’s beauty in being obsolete
Watch a live version of the track recorded at Catherine North Studios in Hamilton and directed and edited by Cameron Veitch (Black Lake) below:
Afterglades is out now via Paper Bag Records and available from the Mappe Of Bandcamp page.
