MEGA BOG
Premieres "For The Old World" Video
New Album Dolphine Out June 28 on Paradise of Bachelors
 |
Photo credit: Indigo Sparke
|
Mega Bog, the art-pop project of multi-instrumentalist Erin Birgy, will release her new album Dolphine on June 28 via Paradise of Bachelors, and today she shares new single "For The Old World" alongside an incredible video directed by Laura Conway. The video features Birgy roaming the American West in chainmail and was inspired by the work of classic filmmakers Ingmar Bergman, Sergei Parajanov, David Lynch, and Michael Powell. It takes its stunning vintage look from its printing on Agfacolor film, a discontinued German film stock.
 |
"When I was writing 'For the Old World,'" says Birgy, "the song was kind of oozing out, sneering and murky, sort of like the feeling I sometimes get when I've spent so much time (sometimes years) on the quality/integrity/authenticity of a project, whether it's a social/romantic/friendship or music/meaning/impressions-and then something really hits you in a devastating way, and you're on this gnarly bender where you become deliberately evil to reflect the absurdity of the whole story. Like walking out of the shower, shaved and sudsed, the light is glowing, the thunderstorm is over, and you trip in a patch of poison ivy and watch your skin boil, torturing that idyllic splinter of peace.
The video takes some space from the song's imagery, and experiments with stories that already exist, to play with our perspectives of the impressions they made, by mirroring the alien worlds in my literal backyard, sort of saying goodbye to these beautiful scenes and environments that have been so dangerous and healing. We tried to visually inspire the jumps from the old and new worlds that are a part of a dreaming human's bubble of thought."
Stereogum, who premiered "For The Old World" today, say the video "has a cultish vibe to it a la Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain... The lens is grainy, amplifying the surreal quality of Birgy staring wistfully through a sheer curtain after getting blood poured all over her. It's bizarre, but fits perfectly for the vibe of this song."
Dolphine is out June 28 on Paradise of Bachelors and also features the previously released single "Diary of a Rose." The record is available for pre-order from the label HERE (LP/CD) and elsewhere HERE (LP/CD/DL/streaming/international options).
"Prismatic avant-pop that balances warbling melodies with unexpected bursts of frenetic energy." - NPR
"Imagine an adventure game quest with Yoko Ono as your guide, or Laurie Anderson doing her best David Attenborough impression: a deep, joyful abstraction that draws to a pure, human conclusion." - PITCHFORK
"'Diary of a Rose' is a stunning introduction to the new record, a jazzy/breezy gem with vaguely sinister undertones, teeming with Birgy's unforgettably peculiar and vivid lyrical phrasing." - GORILLA VS. BEAR
"Rooted in guitar-driven post-punk, ['Diary of a Rose'] flourishes with synths, squeaks, and feedback, sending it way out into the wilderness and back again." - AQUARIUM DRUNKARD
"Sci-fi inspired, warm and idiosyncratic Americana-pop." - TINY MIX TAPES
"Rooted in guitar-driven post-punk, ['Diary of a Rose'] flourishes with synths, squeaks, and feedback, sending it way out into the wilderness and back again." - AQUARIUM DRUNKARD
"Sci-fi inspired, warm and idiosyncratic Americana-pop." - TINY MIX TAPES
"Spacious, warm, and eerie." - STEREOGUM
"Beautiful, otherworldly." - BROOKLYN VEGAN
MORE ON MEGA BOG:
Mega Bog is the fluid musical moniker of songwriter Erin Elizabeth Birgy, a Pacific Northwestern rodeo child with an unmistakable laugh, who was allegedly cursed upon conception. She has spent the last ten years channeling, capturing, and releasing her unique bouquet of fragrant, sci-fi pop experiments with a handful of bicoastal collaborators. Mega Bog has visited a significant portion of the Western world, frequently looping the USA and Europe to sing in tiny art spaces and haunted historical theaters alike. The live concerts are known for their emotional unpredictability. Onstage, Erin's current mood is amplified, for better or for worse; she is an honest and unflinching performer.
The title of Mega Bog's newest album Dolphine-her fifth, and first for Paradise of Bachelors-is inspired by a myth that suggests that, as humankind evolved from sea creatures, some individuals chose not to leave the water and walk the earth, but rather to stay in the ocean and explore the darkness as dolphins. (The extra "e" was added to take the word out of the everyday, translating it into a potential futuristic dialect.) Dolphine is an album for the swimming human shadow obscured by waves. The songwriting was inspired by Erin's own swim through a myriad of overwhelming emotions, including the ongoing mourning following the death of her childhood horse companion Rose, her navigation of the feelings and physicality of two abortions, and the hapless and shattering social, political, and environmental turmoil on the planet known as Earth.
In October of 2016, Erin took her dark sketches to the Outlier Inn studio in Woodridge, NY, with a passionate crew of deeply bonded musicians. Together, they arranged and executed these eleven dizzy pop songs, live, over a tight seven days. In addition to Birgy (vocals, guitar, piano), the lineup included Meg Duffy (guitar), Matt Bachmann (bass),Derek Baron (drums), James Krivchenia (engineering, percussion, effects), Aaron Otheim (synthesizers, piano), and Ash Rickli (guitar and vocals). Later, Will Murdoch (clarinet, synthesizers) and Zach Burba (synthesizers, bass) offered their own atmospheric overdubs from their home on the West Coast. Over the next year, Erin added to the tapestry with vocal contributions by Nick Hakim and Kalen Remy Walther, upright bass by Benjamin Murphy, textural guitar by Austin Jackson, and saxophone by Jeff Tobias, until she had successfully excavated each cold mystery with proper care and wonder. The completed sound is thick and inviting. Bellowing, breathless vocals, mystical lyrics with the presence of poetry and the intuitive logic of dreams, and promiscuous, sometimes dissonant chord structures swirl together, coalescing into hazy and hypnotic fantasies.
The songs of Dolphine are ablaze with jealousy, anger, and sadness as well as the powerful glow that comes from attempting to hold those feelings with care. Inspired by the poetry of Alice Notley, the novels of Ursula K. Le Guin, and the art of Ian Cheng, Birgy spins her manic web of emotions into beautiful, abstract future poems. With each lurid image - a stupid scorpion, an abdomen of small snakes, another picture of milk, foxes bloating up Eastern expressway shoulders-Erin dunks listeners deep into her subconscious, and it's up to us to surface, buoyant, and paddle through.
On album opener "For the Old World," anguished affection and confusion bloom over lounge-music genre perversions, both ethereal and belligerent. On "Diary of a Rose,"Erin steps through her losses and growths to a continuous groove that crescendoes into melodic chaos and revelation. "Truth in the Wild" (the title is taken from a quote by Ian Cheng) speaks surreal and lonely images over soft percussion, classical guitars, and clarinet, pointing to influences like Joni Mitchell's jazz period and Laurie Anderson's 1989 record Strange Angels. "Untitled (with 'C')" was written for Philando Castilethe day after his murder, and "Fwee Again" works through all of Dolphine's devotions instrumentally.
Ash Rickli wrote and sang the airy outlier "Spit in the Eye of the Fire King,"recorded on the porch of the studio with the wind chimes blowing. Between the album's recording sessions and its release, Ash's heart stopped unexpectedly during one of his live shows in Athens, Georgia. He was thirty. The tragedy, devastating to the many people who loved him, permeates the album. Ash sings:
I'm never afraid
I was born in the dark
And I'll die in the light with a tear in my mouth
To extinguish the spark that put light by itself
It's the one thing I could think to do to help
At the beginning of the sessions, Ash wrote a radio play based on his playful interpretation of Erin's tarot reading for herself. Titled Avenging Mind, it was intended as a companion piece to Dolphine. The recording remains unfinished. The following monologue is an excerpt:
That which is freely given... Energy passing unseen from my inner eye ... exacting compassion and careful deliberate movements... There! ... That sphere! ... Of course it's not an ordinary time machine; it's an incubation chamber. One that exists between planes, floating lucidly on the edge of dreams through the spires of Crystal City and beyond to the mountains. I can feel her forming now ... "Athene" ... Safe from the punishment of endless time and realized in a realm through which all things intersect and seem to dissolve.
Dolphine, too, inhabits that realm of realization.
No comments:
Post a Comment