Now recording as G. Brenner, this summer sees Brenner once again team up with Very Jazzed for a brand new album, Brushfire, and today sees the release of a lead single of the same name. Described as the “thesis statement” of the album, the track emerges quietly, a soft hymn supported by nothing but subtle ambient textures. But stark keys emerge, then an insidious shimmer and glitch, and with them the realisation of the coalescing dread. “Santa Ana’s racing through my yard,” Brenner sings. “Watching homes turn into flames / Wonder if my body’s burning up / In a room I lay awake.” What had passed for peace is revealed to be anything but, the fatalist’s brief serenity before the final fall. Brenner sits in California, and California is on fire.

Yet as the ashes fill his lungs and his ribs disintegrate, something emerges. Call it a vision, a dream. An alternate space and time where things are different, and human needs might be met. A place where all that America denies and destroys might be allowed to breathe, where the air itself is not alight. The soaring moment is interrupted by the flames at the door. The intense and cruel present leaving no time for imagination.

Such a realisation is central to ‘Brushfire’. The peculiar sadness of a present so immediate it prevents us from envisioning a future. A grief so strong it registers even as the flames rise and the air turns to soot. The sensation is palpable in Brenner’s final lines, the words giving way to silence before a radio sample rises in the background. A voice quick and desperate, stripped down to sheer reportage in the face of a violence so complete it almost becomes sublime.

The song is accompanied by a video, which Brenner co-directed with co-directed with Amara Higuera Hopping.

Photos by Amara Higuera Hopping, artwork by Hopping and Gabriel Brenner

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The release marked Pastel as a project with a uniquely ambitious vision, more an extension of Brenner’s artwork than musical side project. Through vocals, textures and tones, not to mention silence itself, Brenner conjures soundscapes that move beyond the traditional song, operating with higher intentions. But to cast the style in such a light is to risk suggesting that Pastel is some dense and inaccessible experiment in metaphor, when in reality it is intuitive and heartfelt. Released in 2018, standalone single ‘Close‘ put the idea to bed, “refocusing on a rich pop sound that would be at home amongst the chart toppers,” as we wrote at the time.

Today, Pastel unveils a brand new single, ‘Moon Landing’, a song which solidifies Brenner’s ability to weave stark violence and warm emotion into a single sound. The first look at his forthcoming debut LP, the track is an extremely personal examination of loss and grief, as well as the love that underpins such emotions. His mother dying of cancer, the song finds Brenner at her side, unable to help or intervene in the slow creep of time as the seconds pass away. As the title suggests, the image is compared to that of a rocket launch, a departure from one world to another, all locked in on an unalterable schedule. “Feel her counting down an ending,” Brenner sings, the intensity of his words rising, “’til there’s liftoff.”

Emerging from wind-based field recordings and gently picked acoustic guitar from Warren Hildebrand of Foxes in Fiction, the song proceeds with a haunting hesitancy, Brenner’s vocals warbling across the quiet. The aforementioned liftoff triggers an abrupt change, the background noise growing harsh and pressing as the keys arpeggiate, a loss of control as the processes kick into wild motion. The finale of the track simmers down once more, the furious action passed but still visible in great contrails across the sky.

The artwork for the single features an image of the Challenger disaster in 1986, which broke up seventy-three seconds after launch. The event was broadcast live on TV, a presenter counting down as the camera focuses on the waiting shuttle, strapped onto the launch pad, waiting to go. And go it did, arcing upwards in silent motion before disintegrating into a sublime plume of sparks and smoke, the gathered audience left with no other option than to watch the awesome spectacle.

The remains of the crew were retrieved by marine salvage crews several weeks later, and the fact that those who were destined to experience life beyond earth ended up on the ocean floor changed the American view of space exploration for decades. But with ‘Moon Landing’, Pastel rewrites the story of the Challenger, or else reframes the course of those aboard. Every space shuttle sheds components as it rises, and Brenner takes the physical body as just another component. Death not as some spectacular return to earth but the final unburdening, every physical weight left behind for the final ascension, the spirit eventually able to turn back and look down upon our blue and brilliant world.

Gently landing on the surface
Her legs are dangling
From the crater

Is it different from above?
Are you ever really resting?

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Tracklisting:

Typhoon – Rorschach
Cloud – Two Hands Bound
Trust Fall – do it right
Wooing – In Colour
Tree House – Nonsense
Long Neck – Milky Way
Sara Renberg – Take the Summer Off
Special Moves – Half and Half
Lying Down – Betty and Barney
Pastel – Close
Monarch Mtn – Saint in Armor II
Doomking – I Laid the Prairies to Rest
vierzig skizzen – passwords
Old Robes – The Spider and the Spectator
Jeremy Squires – Gift
Bill Vuono – Think of Me (feat. Earl McVeigh)
Kraków Loves Adana – Rapture
Cool American – Focus
Bucolic – Blue Tree
There’s Talk – Give It Up
Airium + Double Honey – Concrete House Of Dreams And Pools
The Saxophones – Just You
Jelani Sei – LVNDR TWN
Why Dogs Why – Linus

You can find all of our monthly roundup mixes here, and be sure to stick around into March to see what musical goodies we’ll be sending your way. And, of course, please reach out on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram if you have something you think we should hear.

The post February 2018 Roundup appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Now, pastel is back with a brand new single, ‘close’. A tender love song, the track sees a move away from the stark atmosphere of the previous release, refocusing on a rich pop sound that would be at home amongst the chart toppers. Which isn’t to say that Brenner has completely sacrificed the ambient textures. The track cycles through a series of sounds, with several periods conjuring an soaring soundscape. Indeed, Brenner plays with and juxtaposes various states—quiet and loud, simple and intricate—moving from intimate acapella whispers to full expansive swells and back again, and thus capturing the whole gamut of emotions felt within a newfound love.

You can grab ‘close’ now from the pastel Bandcamp page, as well as the entirety of the back catalogue.

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Various Small Flames’

Songs of 2017

Anamon – Kneel Old
Android Automatic – Dark Roads*
Angie McMahon – Slow Mover
Basement Revolver – Johnny Pt. 2
Baxter Roy Long – Paribanou
Bea Troxel – Let Them Know
Big Thief – Mary
Black Belt Eagle Scout – Soft Stud
Bully – Running
Cayetana – Mesa
Charly Bliss – Percolator
Chastity Belt – Different Now
CHUCK – Happy Birthday
The County Liners – Maria
The Courtneys – Tour
Craig Finn – God in Chicago
Crumb – Locket
Crushing – Emery Board
Cut Worms – Like Going Down Sideways
David Bazan – Care
Distant Reader – First Try
Emperor X – God Save Coastal Dorset
Fits – Ice Cream on a Nice Day
German Error Message – 2017*
Gleemer – Soothe Me
Great Grandpa – Favorite Show
Haley Heynderickx – Oom Sha Lala
Hiccup – Teasin’
Horse Culture – Texaco
Illuminati Hotties – ‘(You’re Better) Than Ever’
Japandroids – No Known Drink or Drug
Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit – If We Were Vampires
Jay Som – The Bus Song
Jeremy Squires – Night Cars
Katie Ellen – Drawing Room
Lizzie No – Monuments
Lomelda – Bam Sha Klam
Mike Pace and the Child Actors – Audits & Surveys
Meursault – The Mill
Mount Eerie – Crow
Nice Legs – Mighty Three
Oceanator – Nowhere Nothing
Ohyeahsumi – Daisy
Old Earth – Pit Dynamics
PASTEL – Stammer
Peter Silberman – New York
Phoebe Bridgers – Motion Sickness
Pope – Talk Me Out of It
Protomartyr – Windsor Hum
Rainwater – Place
Ratboys – Elvis is in the Freezer
Rick Rude – Bald & Fat in Houston, TX
Roadkill Ghost Choir – Classics (Die Young)
Rose Dorn – Dirt
See Through Dresses – Lucy’s Arm
Shannen Moser – A Funeral, A Friend, My Sanity
Sinai Vessel – Died On My Birthday
Slaughter Beach, Dog – Phoenix
SOAR – Fort Funston
Soft Fangs – Jordan // Jackson Elementary
Spartan Jet-Plex – We Believe
Strange Ranger – House Show
Strawberry Runners – Garden Hose
Timid, The Brave – Alice
Us and Only Us – Bored of Black
Vagabon – Cold Apartment
Viewfinder – Instant Moonlight
The Washboard Abs – Veil
Waxahatchee – Never Been Wrong
Wild Pink – Albert Ross
William Ryan Fritch – In Our Blood
The Wooden Sky – Swimming in Strange Waters
Ylayali – Cherry Tomatoes

*Strictly released in 2016, but barely, and we covered it in Jan. 2017.

If you missed it, you can see our Favourite Albums of 2017 list here. Also, the curious can find such lists from previous years here.

The post Favourite Songs of 2017 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting:

Twelve Gardens – maria
Gorgeous Bully – oh why
Girl K – Neighbours
Kintsugi San – Time
Brunch – The Goose
Young Jesus – Feeling (Half Stop Session)
Wych Elm – School Shooter
Steve Maloney – Exits
Haley Heynderickx – Oom Sha La La
M.A.G.S. – Mexico
Iris Jupiter – Buzz Cut
Ylayali – Cherry Tomatoes
Anamon – Stubborn Comfort
Micah Vaultz – endless rain, for limitless pain
Pavey Ark – Leaf By Leaf
Henry Jamison – The Last Time I Saw Adrianne
Shamir – 90s Kids
SALES – Talk a Lot
Nassau – Ain’t It Time
Long Neck – Cavity
Pastel – Silhouette
Old Earth – Pit Dynamics

You can find all of of monthly mixes here, plus an assortment of other playlists and song collections. Stayed tuned for October!

The post September 2017 Roundup appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Brenner’s mother is part Pima, and his father part Cherokee, and the EP is intended as an exploration of his “complex relationship with histories of settler colonialism, subsequent traumas, and contemporary Native identities,” an attempt to create a mode of communication able to convey the sense of loss. Rooted in themes of memory and violence, ‘raze’ is a track of of absence, the various instruments and sound recordings framing a central void, Brenner ranging from lonely natural samples to great, crazed swells of noise, atonal and ominous like staccato fury. As such, the song becomes the sonic representation of the silencing faced by Native peoples, the razing not just of buildings or cultures but the very language with which such destruction could be described.

Another track build from sound recordings, ‘haunt’ opens with a lonely trickle of water before the sound of agitated breathing, as though fleeing some terror or else trying to avoid its focus. Menacing electronics join the frame, the breath setting the tempo of the track, its repetition transforming the images it conjures, from fitful disturbance to immense discomfort and finally overwhelming shock. Following this, ‘silhouette’ feels positively rich, the unintelligible opening giving way to Brenner’s vocals which, despite their haunted quality, at least manage to form solid words. These, coupled with the instrumentation, coalesce into an emotive force which rises to a peak before dropping back into the stark ambience.

“Guess my sight’s been bad all along
’cause I look and I look
and I look and I look

but the books don’t say a thing
no they never
taught me a god damn thing”

‘braid’ follows with near complete silence, voices just audible but not decipherable, before Brenner’s grandmother, Carol Arriaza, recites a poem, adorned with nothing but what could be the ticking of a clock, tape hiss, the distant sound of rain. The track represents the strongest example of language within the release, but her somewhat modest tone suggests the persisting inability to communicate adequately, as though she knows such words cannot begin to evoke an entire history of trauma.

‘stammer’ follows with a drawn out opening, ambient tones stretched with the slow beauty of wide open spaces, before the wisps of something emerge, hovering just out of focus. Eventually, various other voice-like sounds appear, consonants cut short, desperate attempts to speak that result in no success, the words beheaded upon first contact with the air. But ironically, such a failure to communicate ends up saying as much or more than words ever could. As Brenner explains:

With absent, just dust, what I realized is that this loss is a language itself. It is a language that one must sit with and parse through carefully to pull meaning from, a process I will perpetually repeat regardless of how much I come to know about my history, my people, and myself.

absent, just dust is available now from the Pastel Bandcamp page, including a cassette edition. Half of all proceeds will be donated to Freshet Collective, who offer jail and court support to water protectors resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline, as well as education to those in the surrounding areas.

The post Pastel – absent, just dust appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting:

Half Gringa – Marte
CHUCK – Happy Birthday
Ian Terry – Cut
Bea Troxel – Let Them Know
Dana Gavanski – How Long Has It Been?
Honey Joy – Done
Miseryslims – Onto Elm Street
See You At Home – Summer Is a Long Way Off
Camp Counselor – Limo Speech
Windbury Street – Skinny Jeans and Sweaters
Philippa Zawe – Time
Big Baby – Not That
Illuminati Hotties – (You’re Better) Than Ever
Señor Fín – Joe Charmers
M Grig – Still Life I
Jacob Faurholt – A Lake of Distortion
Lazy Legs – Bed Head
Steakhouse – National
Francis – Swing
all-caps LADD – Computer Kids
Happy Abandon -Severed Seams
pastel – Silhouette
Nice Legs – I Never Knew
Tucker Theodore – Our Lady Hope

If you’ve missed more than a month of VSF, or just want some good music to listen to, check out our other Monthly Roundup mixes.

The post August 2017 Roundup appeared first on Various Small Flames.