The record’s third track, ‘Why You Love Me’ is a good place to start. The EP’s emotional core, it explores a relationship in all of its complications, seeing the situation from multiple perspectives in order to better understand it. Self-critical introspection sits side by side with a kind of grateful bewilderment as Jordyn unpacks feelings of love and guilt with painful clarity. “In one sense I’m talking about my habits of self-sabotaging a relationship that could be good for me and I don’t give myself the chance to experience that,” she describes. “In another sense it talks about how people continue to love me in spite of my antics and lack of attention and care I give them.”

Solaris is out now via streaming services.

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Consisting of music, videos, sculpture and photography, The Gauze Eyed Gaze Of Bracketed Air bases itself within those days, where the impossibility of grief meets the reality of illness, both cruel and mundane. “This is, at its core, what it is like to know and love someone with dementia,” Collin Thomas explains. “Repetition. Surprise. Repetition. Shock. Repetition. Fatigue. Endless repetition.”

The main body of the project is formed by what Thomas describes as “an album of music in the form of a book,” which is split into sixteen parts and exceeds four hours of music in total. The immersive result—which owes an equal debt to his father’s ambivalence and his mother’s certitude—isn’t so much an encapsulation of its themes as a direct experience for the audience, demanding patience and effort no matter how difficult any passing moment might be. Listen to ‘The Wrong Banquet’, just one of the mammoth project’s sixteen pieces, below.

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Today we’re delighted to share the second Nightosphere single, ‘Faim Dévorante’. A song more fierce and taut than the previous track, at least initially, its intro snapping to life with real purpose in the kind of mean-eyed clarity you might expect from earlier Pedro the Lion. But the energy breaks to leave something more expansive if no less foreboding, as though the energy hasn’t dissipated so much as dispersed across a wide sweep of space. The vocals arrive within this charged quiet, crooned gently but masking some underlying tension, the consuming hunger alluded to in the title perhaps, every aspect of the track pulled by the latent force within its structure, waiting for a spark to ignite the blaze.

Watched a spider crawl down your arm
While you fixed your sharp eye on me
Everything you have you took from someone else
But you say you still feel empty

Don’t look at me
when you’re thirsty
Don’t look at me
when you’re hungry

Artwork by Laura Benson, photo by Lindsey Yoneda

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The dreamy opener ‘Becoming’ imagines a blank slate, the pain of the past wiped away, before ‘Dead Space’ follows with a bleak take on the cathartic process. Far from being a sudden, fulfilling experience of freedom and clarity, here the end of the relationship is a slow uncoupling. When Gliesman sings of layers of skin being removed, the image is not the complete renewal as seen in moulting snakes but rather a gradual shake of dead cells, the past shriveled and flaking, falling to the floor like dust.

As we described in a preview last year, ‘Cave’ is a dichotomous song, “the tender-yet-fierce sound portraying two levels of a relationship—the old, true affection driving a desperate plea for change.” This fondness is warped on ‘Godsend’, a track of strange imagery where compulsion becomes a kind of incarceration, and the pain continues into ‘Drown’, where love and loss are the twin horrors of a particularly vicious double bind.

The lasting images of Learning How to Talk relate to knots and tangles, how clean breaks prove impossible after a certain amount of history is made. To pull away is to complicate matters, tightening the snarl or else tearing some piece of the other in the effort to retrieve yourself. “Yeah, you’re choking me with the parts of you,” sings Gliesman on ‘Whole Again’, but far from some outward aggression to act is unintentional, an inadvertent consequence of trying to separate into two people once more.

Learning How to Talk is out now and you can get it from the Mess Bandcamp page.

Artwork by Lisa A. Ryan 

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