Not least the simple power of working together. Staying Mellow Blues is itself a collaborative affair, with a diverse supporting cast including Maryam Said, Cedric Noel, Eli Kaufman and Yolande Laroche. The result feels like witnessing one person’s singular vision expanded into something beyond their own powers to create. The result is a style still full of personality and idiosyncrasy, a style still inherently theirs, indeed one perhaps more theirs than would be possible had Niemi been working alone.

‘Walking Feels Slow’ is a prime example of such a sound. A track caught between two streams of living, the slow zoomed in and the rapid zoomed out, tapping into the friction between these states to create a humming vibration. “I wanted to evoke the feeling of desperately trying to stay present,” Niemi explains. “The little games we play with ourselves and mantras we repeat to prevent us from projecting or worrying about the past or future.” The aim led toward a kind of mindfulness, though not one emptied of contents as one might imagine, but instead producing its own kind of energy. “There’s a manic energy in trying to slow down and enjoy each bite as if it’s the whole fruit—a sort of buzzing at a high frequency—that I wanted to embody and convey in this track.”

Check out the video filmed and directed by Ali Vanderkruyk below:

Staying Mellow Blues is out on the 5th August via Vain Mina Records and Tin Angel Records and you can pre-order it now.

The post Eliza Niemi – Walking Feels Slow appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The latest Cedric Noel album, nothing forever, everything, falls somewhere toward the indie pop end of the spectrum, though draws upon folk, electronic and devotional influences too. Opener ‘New Recording 3’ gives a good impression as to what expect, hushed folk brought to life with ambient light and searching lyrics. “And am I the subject to it everyday?” Noel asks in the mellow meander of the track’s first half “If I’m told it’s too melancholic to sing about it this way / But it is real isn’t it? / So why bother to give in?”

From here the song grows with the simplest swells of synths, a sound delivered with church organ purity. It is the first true sight of the authenticity of the release, a sensibility that might well stem from the process in which the tracks came to life. “Written in the middle of a bizarre and heavy time last fall, I sat down with the title written and wrote seven of the eight songs in two evenings as a tried to create some kind of emotional and creative release through the form personal concerts for myself,” Noel explains. “It’s a swell thing to get to do from time to time and helps to process whatever has happened in a period of time.”

The immediacy of the recording process creates both a common spirit that binds the songs and also an organic sense of variation. There’s a downbeat cast to ‘light in yr eye’ that even the closing crescendo cannot escape, a tone quite different to the hesitant, sincere ‘changerr’, or the reflective and melancholic ‘when i wish i could sit cross legged’.

Each of Noel’s variations in style feel like an attempt to overcome the difficult circumstances in which he wrote the songs. The mantra-like simplicity of ‘first snow’ finds comfort in quiet and stillness, while ‘caught second’ welcomes Corey Gulkin and passes questions back and forth in attempt at an answer. The hazy pop of ‘everybody wants to love me’ mirrors the uncertainty of the lyrics, though there’s a powerful clarity below the surface, a suggestion that understanding can be found in the very airing of the questions that plague us.

The record closes with the title track, a bright song washed with synths that typifies the nothing forever, everything spirit. It’s one of the calmest of the collection, sung from the other side of the creative outpouring and the comfort it brought. The songs provide no clear salve to the woes, no sudden epiphany, but rather a new understanding of the situation. The sense that nothing is as simple as it appears. That no clear binary exists between possessing something and losing it. This is signified by the closing refrain, the album’s title chopped and changed into a series of statements. Just as Cedric Noel shuffles genres to find new value and meaning, the song reconfigures the phrase to delve into the real divergence and nuance of lived experience.

Nothing forever, everything
Everything forever, nothing
Forever nothing, everything
Forever everything, nothing
Nothing forever, everything
Forever everything

nothing forever, everything is out now and available fro the Cedric Noel Bandcamp page.

The post Cedric Noel – nothing forever, everything appeared first on Various Small Flames.