Brooklyn-based experimental musicians Desvelada and Sprælle have released their first joint EP, escaping from the body of a sleeping hummingbird on label Contain, a podcast and multi-media project based in Austin and Los Angeles.
Born from Austin’s fledgling experimental music scene, Sprælle’s art rock beginnings and distended guitar and production work fold lovingly into Desvelada’s choir upbringing and live vocal processing to create a unique feeling of uncertainty and discomfiture.
The 5-song EP moves through obscure, sometimes painful natural landscapes – it feels like the pair are here to ask questions to which there are no answers. On opening track épié (‘spied’) Desvelda and Sprælle wade with us through a treacle of confused dreamscape. Who is spying? Who are they spying on?
The pair say of their work that “spare synth bass and mournful drones create for us a hinterland of abandoned narratives, of characters unsure or unaware or unwilling to see that they are ghosts, but carrying with them a fatigued and defiant air of hope throughout.” épié’s lyrics compound this sense of ambiguity:
in the labyrinth of my mind (I dreamt of you) / what else is there? / you burn in my being / there is nothing more to say.
The EP sounds like a kind of reverie of the natural world, or at least some version of it. In tree up ahead, birdsong floats overhead while we, perhaps like the rivers referred to earlier in turn to talk, meander slowly into an anarchic canon of Desvelada’s voice. It feels like the pair want to remind us of the chaos of the natural world and our influence on it.
Turn to talk is the project’s most joyous moment, spending some minutes finding its feet before slowly expanding into a blissful release. But it is a tentative release, as if the pair are afraid of having whatever it is they have nurtured snatched away again. The production is generally sparse throughout, with playful and sometimes surprising use of pads and tones that you might expect to hear in 80s productions.
Desvelada and Spraelle cite Tricky (of Massive Attack), Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Berman as influences. This eclecticism underpins the music, with each song carrying a resistance to containment reflecting the natural world that Desvelada and Spraelle want us to think about.
While asleep, hummingbirds enter a state of torpor – some kind of hibernation – where their body temperature can drop by as much as 50 degrees. Is this how Desvelada and Sprælle feel? Does this torpor reflect, in their eyes, the state of the natural world, as humans encroach inch by mile? Is escaping from the body our only option left?
