Joined by Matt Schlatter (bass, lead guitar, synth), Andrew Tivon Orenstein (drums) and Jon-Delia Freeman (violin), Skedgell brings this mood to life with the eye of a storyteller and a traditional folk style. Music as folk horror or fairytale, albeit grounded in a human experience. Each track a glimpse into the esoteric space between myth and reality, where auguries line up to signal our coming fates, and strange images resonate with deeper truths.

Opener ‘Carolina’ is a track we’ve described previously as “loaded with oneiric strangeness, the sense of uncanny discovery particular to dreams.” Here sleep comes as a blank slate, a space beyond the binding categories of reality where new stories can be crafted, both histories and futures escaped. “I often lost my name in my sleep,” Skedgell sings, and later ‘name’ is switched out to ‘needs’, the sound somewhere between ominous and alluring, as though to commit to such a habit carries both promise and unease. For the rest of the track speaks of lost loved ones, of a world on fire, an empire half-mad with its own desires. Where else might relief be found but sleep?

But the foreboding is counterbalanced by a tenderness too. Take tracks like ‘The Sculptor’ or ‘The Amphitheatre’, which possess real warmth, even while haunted by the dead. ‘Black Locust’ is similarly fond in its tone, a love letter to a garden tree “at once cryptic and intuitive,” as we wrote in a previous review. “A contemplation of the value and beauty of what we cannot know.” As we noted then, the song serves a stellar example of the manner in which Mother Juniper broaches mystery with such a curious and instinctive eye. “If there are things beyond our understanding,” we continued, “deeper than our surface experience of the world, then Skedgell brings them into relief, skirting around their edges so that something of their shape might become apparent.”

The idea comes back to the image of small animals and the ominous sky, something Mother Juniper return to with ‘I Dreamt of a Snake’. “In this dream I was the snake / Said can you help me out?” Skedgell says, voice hushed and spoken. “All secret creatures are in danger / Of being found out.” The fear in ‘These Little Animals’ was leavened by the sublime potential of the ominous sky, as though fear of a certain size becomes its own transcendence. But here the tone is altogether more modest. Vulnerability as it is lived. And what results is the very thing which elevates Mother Juniper above much of the esoteric folk canon. For just as Skedgell is willing to walk out into the mystical, it is never done without human grounding. As highlighted by closer ‘Apology of Hades’, where even the god of the dead himself is wracked by remorse and regret.

Winter comes too early
Too early for me
I should’ve let you go
Not taken you from sleep

Write The Soil Lighter is out now via Spirit House Records and available from the Mother Juniper Bandcamp page.

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With the album coming next month on Spirit House Records and Wilbur & Moore Records, Oropendola is back with brand new single, ‘Trust the Sun’, which we have the pleasure of sharing today. A song which turns away from the woozy haze of ‘Knocking Down Flowers’ in favour of something altogether more vivid, from the threaded piano and its poignant clarity to the growing weight of the vocals themselves. All delivered with an almost cyclical pattern which escalates across the runtime, as though in coalescing around itself, the song finds some internal means to grow.

“I often have this fear that there is something inherent in me that is unstable,” Schubert explains of the single. “Hazardous. Unloveable, even. A curse leaving me doomed to forever push my loved ones away. A slippery slope that leaves trust—in others, in myself—wounded at the base.” Written during March 2020, ‘Trust the Sun’ was created in opposition to this anxiety, crystallising as Brooklyn bloomed into its springtime self through the window of the apartment in which Schubert was now mostly confined. “Forsythias, rhododendrons, eastern redbuds, and cherry blossoms were taking turns exploding open as the world was shutting down,” as she continues. “I took long walks on bewilderingly sunny days and found immense comfort tracking the intricacies of spring, noticing the order of the blooms and the alternating cycles of death and rebirth.”

Applying such close observation to human relationships too, Schubert found herself contemplating her own history of friends and lovers, tracing patterns otherwise too intricate or uncomfortable to follow. A process which seemed overwhelming at first, triggering an urge to flee, though instead Schubert channelled the instinct into Oropendola and chose to sit with the emotions she had unearthed. “‘Trust the Sun’ started as a lament, a plea,” she states, “but eventually, it became a mantra.”

Armed with the song as a kind of protection spell, Oropendola once again chooses to embrace transience. Not merely as a coping mechanism, but a way to more fully inhabit the beauty of the world. “Take a breath, plunge into the water, and savor the cherry blossoms before their once-luscious flowers become fragments of pink dust on the earth,” as Schubert says. “Accept that strong green summer leaves turn to fire and crumple with the pinch of a fist, and it’s not just okay, it’s actually beautiful.” And with this beauty comes self-awareness, then patience, kindness. “Over time it became easier to be more generous with my heart, to extend myself outwards more and more, trying not to fear, but rather embrace, the unpredictability and ephemerality of it all. I walked and marvelled, no matter the season, felt it when the sun came out, allowed its light to find space within me, and allowed myself to find more joy spreading it to other people.”

Photos by Chimera Singer 

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With an agile fluidity of its own, Waiting For The Sky to Speak takes this idea to heart. A collection of songs which dances between the hard binaries of life, be it presence and absence, past and future, life and death, and embraces the ephemeral as a kind of freedom. Only in committing to the pendulum’s motion can we beat the finality at either pole of its swing.

Single ‘Knocking Down Flowers’ is the perfect introduction to the record. A song which came into being when Schubert started her own version of Julia Cameron’s ‘morning pages’ activity from The Artist’s Way, recording improvised pieces each day. “I recorded morning pages #1 soon after a pivotal, complicated, on-and-off relationship reached its end,” Schubert explains. “Round and round we went, addicted to one another, unable to break free of a sticky cycle that prevented us from fully blooming together. That song seed turned into ‘Knocking Down Flowers’ within a few days.”

The intuitive process is perhaps unsurprising given the inherently personal nature of the song. “There was a construction site near my old apartment in South Slope, Brooklyn that the two of us would often pass by,” Schubert continues. “We developed a bit—bittersweet in retrospect—that it was our home:

We would peer through the diamond-shaped opening at the stunted barren landscape beyond and imagine the possibilities. Dirt, trash, patches of weeds, colorful graffiti on the green walls, the droning hum of the Prospect Expressway: our weird little insular paradise. One evening, the site’s door was slightly ajar. We made it inside of our home, for the first and only time, photographing one another, running around and dancing with abandon, beers in hands reaching towards the sky.

The single exists within such a space. Somewhere outside of the present but not quite the past or future either—something like liminal space of a pendulum’s arc. A kind of pocket between periods where consequences are suspended, and nothing is risked in dreaming.

Waiting for the Sky to Speak is out on the 17th March via Spirit House Records and Wilbur & Moore Records and you can pre-order it now from the Oropendola Bandcamp page.

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Fast forward a few years, and several releases later, Lea Thomas has unveiled Mirrors to the Sun, a brand new full-length on Spirit House Records which again looks to explore our position within the natural world. Take single ‘Hummingbird’, a track evoking the transportive, transcendent powers of nature. The song takes inspiration from a dream in which Thomas “dissolved into a pool of saltwater and re-emerged as a large white wolf,” dismantling the barrier between the personal and the wild. “I am a white wolf / Running, running, running free,” she sings. “Then I remember my heart started beating / To the sound of the universe / I leaned into the feeling / Like a hummingbird.”

Again evoking lupine imagery, ‘Howl’ picks up from this sense of freedom, conjuring the primal joy of finding love. The sense of movement and harmony in submitting to the force. Other tracks are more reflective, with ‘Magnolias’ pondering the impermanence so familiar to the ecological sphere, though emerging from the melancholy with a sense of healing and power. ‘How Would I dream?’ is equally wistful, the transience this time extending as far as memories and dreams.

But implicit in any engagement with the natural world is its ever accelerating collapse. ‘Heat Keeps Rising’ faces up to the ongoing disaster in all its overwhelming weight, not to mention the dizzying strangeness of living through such a time. “This song is a practice in continuing to ask the heavy questions even when it seems like there may be no immediate resolve,” Thomas told Guitar Girl Magazine. “We recorded it live and left a lot of room for improvisatory exploration so we could see where those questions would take us—surely, towards a new perspective.”

A video directed by Michelle Sui with cinematography from Alice Millar furthers this style, a visualisation which helps chart the surreal contours of the moment. The song opens with a relatively sedate rhythm, though Thomas’s vocals soon kick into a kind of tripping momentum, each line piling atop of the last and evoking the claustrophobic bustle of an ever-warming city. “The heat keeps rising,” Thomas breathes in moment of pause, though the instrumentation soon rises in response, pushing the track (and video) into a kind of frantic fever dream. Only, one from which there is no waking.

Mirrors to the Sun is too astute to offer much hope in such times, but Lea Thomas also refuses to submit to doom. They might not find answers within nature, but there is always consolation. Something in the wider impermanence that brings comfort to our own. The reinforcement of the present and its tender beauty. Final track ‘Close to Me’ is carved from such wisdom. Returning to the energies of the white wolf and dissolving dream in a subtle, humble form. No great transformation, but a (re)connection with nature nonetheless.

I trust my body when it tells me
That the work can wait till tomorrow.
Let the worries in my mind turn swift into sparrows,
Find their rest among the pines again.

Like the winds that had raised me and carried me here,
I could drift for miles understanding nothing
But the freedom song of the grasses
As they whisper for no witnesses:

Stay close to me

Mirrors To The Sun is out now via Spirit House Records and available from the Lea Thomas Bandcamp page.

Photography by Hannah Rosa Lewis-Lopes

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