Mothlights - Kelartic single
Release date: December 9th 2022
Artist Information
- Label: Strawberry Moon Records
- Genre: Slowcore
- Hometown: Washington, D.C.
- Influences: Bluetile Lounge, John Fahey, The Microphones
- Sounds like: Low, Julien Baker, Daniel Bachman
Biography
The debut album from POC-led slowcore project Mothlights, Walking The World With A Leaky Umbrella (Strawberry Moon Records), is both an artistic feat of escapism and a statement of political, cultural, and societal defiance. The album came to be during an outpouring of fevered creativity in downtown Washington DC amidst the George Floyd uprisings, the COVID lockdown, and the events of the Jan 6th Insurrection. The 15-song record confronts political themes of decolonization, reculturation, antifascism and climate anxiety alongside personal themes of melancholy, remembrance, and mental health struggles. Preceding the album will be the eerily emotive single, Kelartic.
Mothlights’ primary singer songwriter, Rishi Gupta, has been in and out of punk and post hardcore groups since his early teens, and began releasing folk music under the name Kindred Wings in 2014. Mothlights represents a fresh artistic continuum for Rishi. It draws on the influences of slowcore artists like Low, Bluetile Lounge, and Carissa’s Wierd; singer-songwriters like Jackson C Frank, Julien Baker, and Elliott Smith; and instrumentalists such as John Fahey, Tashi Dorji, Marisa Anderson, and Leo Kottke. In addition, Rishi sought inspiration from traditional Bengali folk music heritage.
Mothlights’ Walking The World With A Leaky Umbrella was produced in isolation in a 700 square-foot apartment. In this spartan domestic space, the composer, guitarist, producer, and singer found solace in writings from historical revolutionary figures and fantasy literature, trying to synthesize the melancholy and exhaustion of the real world during that time and the imagination of a better world into a new batch of songs. “Looking at the wave of reaction gripping the world, I tried to express the melancholic stuff I felt so that I could find militancy in the mourning. The commonness and vulgarity of folk music and the particularities of it has always felt like a good vehicle for expressing those feelings in a socially conscious way for me, so I pulled those sounds in,” Rishi says.
The songs on Walking The World With A Leaky Umbrella express depression and pain lyrically and compositionally. The tracks feature carefully sculpted soundscapes crafted from layers of noise and found sound; lyrical vocabulary and forms from other languages such as Russian, Yiddish and Sanskrit; and a mosaic of seemingly disparate influence such as blues, ragtime, folk, raga, psychedelia, slowcore, rock, jazz, and noise. Here, aesthetics become weaponized.
Walking The World With A Leaky Umbrella feature songs with dense arrangements, odd time signatures, strangely timbred instrumentation, freeform tempo, deteriorating audio loops, ambient layers of samples, richly textured guitar parts, heavily layered vocal harmonies, and unconventional percussion, including Vietnamese traditional drums and water percussion. The sparse and haunting “Flooding” is layered with spectral ethereal textures, airy vocals, and shadowy guitar. This song is the album’s most despairing—a collective death narrated with evocative and elegiac lyrics. One standout passage reads: A red plastic shard will be all that’s left of us/“They saw it coming, careless/Washed this earth into a memory”/I can’t let go though it's already gone. The beautifully fleeting “Oxford” is less than a minute of folk bliss, featuring gentle fingerpicking textured with airy ambience. The moody “Incarnadine” explores the primitive folk guitar stylings of John Fahey and Leo Kottke. The stunning “Chunibala” boasts layers of scuzzy lo-fi noise as counterpoint to guitar playing that connects the dots between Indian microtonal melodicism and David Gilmour-esque stratospheric lead guitar. Buried in the dense thicket of sound here is a sample of a Bengali folk song with Rishi expertly mimicking the serpentine vocal inflections.
The single, Kelartic, is achingly beautiful art-folk brimming with scruffy atmospherics and echo-like effects that make individual instruments hard to place. In sociolinguistics, Kelartic refers to an invented world language which would make it possible for members of different communities to connect and communicate. Overall, the song comes off like a slow-burn lo-fi symphony with what sounds like found sound, piano, and some horn-like instrument. It’s the aural equivalent of a blurry picture that evokes a deep-seated longing. During the song, Rishi sings: I wanted to tell someone/Write a new language just for the end/With syllables sweet/Letters that crumble like buildings. “I was reading a lot Wittgenstein [Austrian-British language and mind philosopher] and Deleuze [French philosopher], and ranting to my partner that there was no language to describe the things that were going on at large,” Rishi says.
Upcoming Shows
- January 6th // Richmond, VA // Solitary Confinement
Listen (or download here)
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