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At Home With My Candles

by Half Shadow

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TheSlowMusicMovement
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TheSlowMusicMovement Unsurprisingly most lockdown LPs focused on mental states which makes Half Shadow's wide eyed analysis of his abode, its reassuring monotony & existential anchoring, & in his case as a catalyst for freak folk fantasies & psychedelic poetry even more refreshing. You'll never look at your wardrobe, yoga mat & pot plants the same way again.
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1.
at the inn my heart is a hyena, poised to feed or suckle young my hair is long, black and braided with silver daggers madly trailing in the copper autumn wind I have a feeling for a mirror that surely must be made to mark the endless stream of phantoms marching through my memory oxalis leaves make purple wreathes around my skull as my taps clack on the octagonal ochre tile ringing telepathic to my mind outside the lunar screams of morse, the cylindrical, burgeoning, ever-rebirth of the radiant dawn horse my hollow hand looms conducting visions unmade, absolute and I'm at the root now and I'm at the root somehow with all your visions echoing inside my little wooden room
2.
your eye flashes so beautifully shy what is it that you're hiding in what hold do you keep your secret glow and where wages your hidden war? and what door can you open onto timeless shore? an ocean breathes in a midnight moonles and unmoored
3.
mineral wake, ochre seed white stalk like bone from underneath soft lines, speech of my palm holding essences for soil I'm happy to give them all I watch the poppies bloom weeping evening blue mineral bright water effortless dew I sleep with you I sleep with you at the root at effortless dawn, moonset in the purple light of timelessness I hide within a net of bells: struck the earth is rich black enough a cold and eager wind alights upon the skin with a waking gust my stone pillow turns to dust I sleep with you I sleep with you at the root
4.
yea, I practice dying in the spare room yea, I practice dying in the spare room I sigh and haunt the floor knowing well, the grain of dark wood yea, I practice dying in the spare room yea, I practice dying in the spare room as light sneaks itself between the curtain and my gloom how does it flutter? what is its secret mood? yea, I practice dying and it's so hard to give it up, and yet the body traces its innumerable pounds for soil yea, I practice dying in the spare room yea, I practice dying in the spare room seeds of floating silk shine (seeds of floating) seeds of... seeds of floating silk shine and are pocketed for the tomb yea, I practice dying in the spare room yea, I practice dying in the spare room yea, I practice dying a figment, a flicker of the truth my flesh soon unraveling my body in the weighted womb yea, I practice dying and its so hard to give it up and yet my body traces my body, my body traces my... my body my body traces my body beyond the body, my body traces my body beyond the body everything I ever...was not my body everything I ever, ever, ever was not my body everything I ever, ever, ever was not my body's thinking oh, and I practice dying in the spare room yea, I practice dying in the spare room
5.
the ringing in my ears sunlit denim, simple devotion an orange before me a full day spent, between the worlds rainy day in paradise pure spring water stop for tea, to the body crowned, earthly crowned, to the body speak without using your mouth to the mysterious further higher peak myrtle, my body in the home-house-hold holding my body in the shining valley of leftover silverness ten day forecast simple devotion an orange before me a full day spent, between the worlds the ringing in my ears how does one find themselves in the house when on every door comes a ceaseless knocking that refuses to stop?
6.
the candles on the nightstand throw vivid thoughts upon the wall as the evening unfurls itself in its wide, dark undertow the curtains they still freely dance in the wind's warm arms how solemn your body laying next to mine your hands and brow rich with the constellated lines of life but hiding out the fragrant air calls on my heart nude, radiant out into the night to swim in the lithe blue-violet wind's arms halo of my candles burning alight to grasp the grain that rules the heavy air to swim to the source... the very eye of night
7.
come meet me in the place where I am hidden harbouring the famous mountain there is no path, and there is no mission only brief premonitory visions that come and go like cottonwood flown on soft wind 'cause i'm not waiting... I'm not waiting on the world I'm not waiting I'm not waiting on the world in a moment a moon covered up my mind a planet eclipsing my sight gentlest catacylsm I said "did you feel that?" and you said "it's mine forever, all the time." I said, "do you feel that?" and you said "like a quiver." I said, "do you feel that?" and you said "like a quiver." What we receive, what's coming hither What we receive, what's coming hither.... in my room in my room a creature a hidden creature approaches approaches approaches come meet me in the place where I am hidden come meet me in the place where I am hidden 'cause i'm not waiting... i'm not waiting on the world i'm not waiting i'm not waiting on the world
8.
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#8 05:08

about

PRE-ORDER VINYL LPS FROM BUD TAPES BY CLICKING HERE:
budtapes.bandcamp.com/album/at-home-with-my-candles

At Home With My Candles, Half Shadow’s third LP is an album of mythopoetic paeans to the domestic uncanny—the mysterious and unseen worlds experienced at home. Recorded almost entirely in quarantine, the record’s songs chart the beauty and strangeness that domestic life can conjure, at once ordinary and utterly mystical. Long the enigmatic moniker of Portland’s Jesse Carsten, Half Shadow’s new songs expand the project’s intimate poetics into something more expansive and encompassing, without ever losing a sense of tenderness. Intimate folk songs magnify into anthemic chant-alongs, lo-fi dirges, and primal pop experiments. Genres blend with a subtly psychedelic grace, with Carsten’s voice delivering dream-laden poems always at the center of the sound. Listeners are sung into an interiorized sphere: an otherworldly landscape of tension, languor, and mystery. From the place of home a whole cosmos fans out.

Taking its cues from the surrealists, and especially Leonora Carrington, whose famous self-portrait inspired the lead off track (“Inn of the Dawn Horse”), the album’s lyrics welcome dream logic and non-linearity as central tenets of their make-up. Like the fractured, domestic narratives of Maya Deren’s oceanic films, or the strange, liminal interiors of Dorothea Tanning’s paintings, these songs eschew conventional extraversion, instead revealing subtler stratas of the domestic. Home becomes a portal to the imaginal: painted in all the vivid and occasionally unsettling colors of the unconscious realm. Eternity grows from the psychedelic soil of the yard (“Song for the Garden”), enigmatic presences stalk a darkened bedroom (“In My Room (A Creature Approaches)”), and a lover’s whispered voice opens the entryway to a clandestine beach (“Flame (Flower in the Air)”). As in so many dreams, landscape and interiority blend, revealing an elemental world, that while unpredictable, is full of beauty and visceral emotion.

At Home’s songs test this boundary between the interior and the infinite, as on “Moonless (Unmoored)” in which Carsten repetitively incants “what door can you open onto timeless shore? / an ocean breathes in a midnight, / moonless and unmoored.” Something more profound and unexpected haunts this space, an uncanny presence worthy of devotion. With an ecstatic tenderness, Carsten’s lyrics come to chant this living unknown: “From my heart is tethered / even more / From my heart is tethered great emptinesses of galaxies abhorred / and your great face / my word to explore / your great face, opening / like a blossom on the verge of / nothing more.” From the opening of the garden gate to the black edge of the expanding universe, these songs brim electric, full of a hearth’s roaring fire, and the darkness after its gone out. What cosmic force might be hiding in that absence? What deep mystery can a house hold? Revelations are poised in half-light, uncovered only briefly, before slipping back into the dark.

This duality of light and dark, the hidden and the exalted has remained a marker of Half Shadow’s poetics since the project’s beginning. This record is no different. Returning from a particularly exhausting tour in November of 2019, Carsten came back to Portland with the intention of putting new songs to tape. Turning inward felt like the right medicine following the extroversion of travel and a busy show schedule. Coincidentally most of the Half Shadow songs collected in notebooks and voice memos over the last year were about home—its beauty, generosity, its difficulties, and strangeness. What began as two weeks of recording time expanded into months of writing and rewriting, dreams collected and poeticized, and a deeper, more insular experience of home as the gloomy winter in the Pacific Northwest set in. Then, the virus, a country-wide lockdown, and a requirement to view the home-space in an entirely new way. From an expressly outer world, to an overtly, uncomfortably inner one in a matter of days. From sunlight into full, unexpected shadow.

What began as a thematically synchronistic project grew into a timely and urgent contemplation: how do we truly relate to these spaces that we inhabit, habitually, unconsciously; that hold us in our most fragile moments and challenge us in their monotony? Play host to our deepest fantasies and fears, joys and strifes, creative workings, personal successes and failures? How do we love in these spaces, find connection, grieve, and grow? How are houses like a skin—a mind, a body—in which we must live and leap, finding the strength to risk a more complex life? Or as the song “A Full Day Spent (Between the Worlds)” puts it: “how does one find themselves in the house / when on every door comes a ceaseless knocking / that refuses to stop?” The world calls us out into its churning energy, its wide space, its communal atmosphere, and yet—as so many of us have been forced to endure these past years—sometimes we must remain turned inward, in contemplation, held in the house of mystery, sometimes against our will.

While At Home’s songs were for the most part collected to tape in solitude, the album’s texture came alive with the help of a group of collaborators recording their parts at a distance. Featuring contributions from Yaara Valey (Antiquated Future), Zach Burba (Iji, Mega Bog, Dear Nora), Jem Marie (The Ghost Ease), Julian Morris (Layperson, Post Moves), and mastering from Kevin Christopher (Oh Rose, Ancient Pools), these songs emerge in vivid technicolor. While retaining their humble core, these acoustic visions spiral out in echoes of droning violin, bellowing orchestral flugelhorn, glittering synth, and choral waterfalls of multitracked voices. These are joyful, eclectic song-collages, that embrace the experimental and environmental songwriting tradition of the Pacific Northwest while enfolding an array of more canonical art-voicings. Think ‘Venus in Furs’ crossbred with Sade, played back on Brigitte Fontaine’s stereo with Robbie Basho’s detuned guitar dancing in rivulets over the Raincoats-esque free violin phrasing. Sounds are familiar but somehow altogether unanticipated and revivifying; trance inducing, luscious. Could this music-landscape be a new home?

Half Shadow reveals a world surviving on the edge of the known and generously offers it to the tortured ears of the day-sleepers. A piscean dream-vision shining through silver branches into the bedroom of every seeking soul. At Home opens the curtains and collects these lunar sound rays in a tea-bowl for drinking up; a sense of poetic nourishment in sonic form. By its close At Home With My Candles has induced a surreal clarity and continued the work begun with Half Shadow’s 2019 album Dream Weather Its Electric Song: engaging listeners in a process of seeing our world, our selves, and in this case the homes we haunt, with new, uncanny vision. At Home With My Candles is out April 8, 2022 on Bud Tapes and Dove Cove Records.

credits

released April 8, 2022

Recorded and Mixed at the House of Plenty, Portland; Sou'wester Lodge, Seaview, Washington as part of their Artist Residency; and at the Riegel Homestead, Granite Bay, California, November 2019-August 2021. Distance Recording was done in friends' personal studios all over the West Coast.

All Songs by Jesse Carsten except "A Full Day Spent (Between the Worlds)" which is a found poem, written by Allison Riegel originally as a brainstorming list. Copyrights in infamy.

Zach Burba - Saxophone
Jesse Carsten - Guitar, Vocals, Drums, Bass, Violin, Percussion, Keyboards
Grant Fairbrother - Vocals
Jacob Jaffe - Piano
Julian Morris - Vocals
Jem Marie - Vocals
Kira Sassano - Vocals
Marit Schmidt - Viola
Yaara Valey - Flugelhorn, Vocals

Mastering by Kevin Christopher at Heavy Meadow Sound
Photos by Allison Riegel & Jesse
Design & Layout by Jesse

Released as a collaboration between Bud Tapes, Dove Cove Records, and Illusion Florist Records.

BUD 31; DC 013; IF 005

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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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