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5 New Songs of Half Shadow

by Half Shadow

supported by
Grant Fairbrother
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Grant Fairbrother Get ready for the middle of Horizon, no spoilers! Favorite track: Horizon.
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1.
Horizon 02:51
2.
3.
Dream II 03:13
4.
Psalter 02:58
5.

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ORDER CASSETTES FROM THE ILLUSTRIOUS BUD TAPES: budtapes.bandcamp.com/album/5-new-songs-of-half-shadow

5 New Songs of Half Shadow is the latest cluster of healing gems from Half Shadow, the dream-laden songwriting project of Portland’s Jesse Carsten. Written under the tutelage of Phil Elverum (Microphones/Mount Eerie) as part of a course given through LA’s School of Song, this brief but evocative EP translates a season of inner work into a 16 minute trip of experimental folk and left field song experiments. Each track, written in response to a writing prompt, allows new shades of shadow to be unveiled in sound and lyric. From the revelatory opener “Horizon,” a folk ode to the ocean’s curative power—which explodes at its climax with the force of a metallic tsunami—to the closer “Moon Worn Thin,” invoking poet Rainer Maria Rilke and a new-found self-love, these tracks chart a path of personal growth in song. Moving easily between a quiet intimacy and a romantic maximalism, these vivid poem-songs insinuate the rhythmic, non-linear process of evolving as a human, and excavate moments of silent illumination that sweep through like a sudden sun ray or a fog cloud. 5 New Songs is in this way like peering into a seeker’s notebook and gaining witness to flashes of struggle, its transcendence, and the search for selfhood—the poetic trademarks of Half Shadow’s now decade-long body of work.

More minimal and focused than 2022’s At Home With My Candles, this EP still resonates as a clear follow up, continuing Carsten’s exploration of the liminal overlay of home and world, environment and inner landscape. “Voice of Rain,” renders feelings of personal isolation which quickly become reflections of a larger, collective emotional state. Carsten sings “I woke up hungry / for a life of wild grace / shine of the phone on my face at dawn / remembering a loneliness / in which we all bathe.” These lyrics, borne aloft by a dark-warbling synth part, betray the a felt tension between the spiritual world and the mundane and display Carsten’s uncanny ability to disclose subtler truths buried in the so-called ordinary. Similarly “Dream II,” translating the atmosphere of a solitary day at home during a wild, Pacific Northwest winter storm, Carsten’s interior remains lit by “moons” that mysteriously glow and spiritually awaken the singer. The song, built of harmonium drone and rollicking hand drums, echoes Brigitte Fontaine’s work from the early 70’s, and ends in a brief choral passage that would find itself in good company among Diane Cluck’s multi-tracked acapella tunes. “Psalter,” another track created via writing prompt, attempts to render Carsten’s entire sexual history in 3 minutes—an assignment offered by Elverum, as originally envisioned by the writer Melissa Febos—uncovering apparently trivial moments of intimacy as strange, otherworldly and full of meaning. Carsten, spinning erotic lines such as “then my lover of many ages, as queer as a shadow came / your mouth of juice at the river hungrily drinking from me,” conjures the sexier lyricisms of Will Oldham or Leonard Cohen—whose distinctive guitar picking pattern Carsten borrows for the song.

While these are new, explorative, creative locations for Half Shadow to inhabit, the project never loses sight of its soulful underpinnings. Wrapped in layers of vibrant, rainy field recordings, these songs speak to an innately human revelatory process via archetypal poetries. “When the senseless crash of the world wears your crescent heart thin / there’s an emptiness to rest in / and there are images to free the inner vision,” Carsten nearly whispers on “Moon Worn Thin.” Half Shadow’s songs here are about biting memory, and the hours of personal challenge in which we’re forced to undergo necessary, if painful, psychological change: surrendering to the motion of the cosmos, and to life itself. What’s left when, lost in a daydream, having been steamrolled by an uncaring world, we stare into the heart of ocean and forget ourselves, even for a moment? 5 New Songs attempts to obtusely answer this query, offering small visions suggestive of a subtle, restorative grandeur. 5 New Songs of Half Shadow is out December 8th, 2023 on Bud Tapes.

credits

released December 8, 2023

All Songs Written & Recorded by Jesse Carsten, Spring 2023 at The House of Plenty More, Portland Oregon. Mastered by Skyler Pia.

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Half Shadow Portland, Oregon

“Half Shadow, the ever-evolving songwriting extension of Jesse Carsten, is built of a series of weighted dream- songs...filled with detours to unexpected lands where the line between open and unhinged is thin. Carsten's performances are invariably powerful, full of wonder, and unlike anything else."

Portland Mercury
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