orchid mantis and the enigmatic air of "light beyond (right now)" (Official Video)

"i remember racing home late at night, just to make it while you were awake"

The basic fluid chord progression, the push of notes ascending and descending on Orchid Mantis' dreamy track "light beyond (right now)" is not extraordinary by any means. A non feeling musician might even called it derivative but what is extraordinary is how Thomas Howard casts light on them, wraps varied shadows of emotions on them through the precise timbre of sound, the framing of tempo and the psychological punch of Howard's lyrical narrative told in his own imperfect way.

Orchid Mantis is an Atlanta, Georgia based experimental solo recording project Howard started in 2014 were he "attempts to inhabit the edge between ambient song structures and pop songwriting, employing unusual/lo-fi recording methods & weird, obscured samples"

'light beyond (right now) is from the album 'far from this world' (out everywhere now via Z Tapes Records) and I really like what I am hearing. For me, one of the best possibly outcomes of listening to someone's music is that it somehow shapes me in some small way either by tapping into my memory banks or molding my dreams or inspiring me to create something and many of these songs do just that. 

Some of what is happening is the creation of an ethereal atmosphere where, depending on your own headspace, the lyrics may become incidental to the experience (or not). This was the case on tracks like "feels like i'm just waiting for you to come home" and "never know why". It could because the vox might be pushed back and the use of past conversations or taped "things" poke through, further made off kilter by dissonant things happening in the background. Other tracks feel like literally bending or reverse masking memories ("timeless / ibis dream" and "It all seems the same").

"light beyond (right now)" has an accompanying lyric video and, about it, Howard shares:

"This new lyric video for ‘light beyond (right now)’ was assembled from a collection of 100+ film photos I’ve taken since 2014. In the background are VHS clips my friend recorded during an old lakehouse trip. Film photography has always been a part of the visual art surrounding Orchid Mantis, so with this video I thought I would showcase them fully as a sort of retrospective. This song was one of the more sentimental/nostalgic tracks on the album, so it seemed appropriate to look backwards at these last several years and create a sort of document preserving that period of my life."

-Robb Donker Curtius

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Orchid Mantis is an experimental solo recording project. The project began in 2014 and attempts to inhabit the edge between ambient song structures and pop songwriting, employing unusual/lo-fi recording methods & weird, obscured samples.

orchid mantis, indie rock, experimental music, alternative, dream pop, shoegaze, lo-fi pop, ambient pop, Atlanta Georgia, album "Far from this World"