"What do it take to be seen as a man red flowing these veins just as sure as I stand..."
Songs serve us in many ways. They can be a soundtrack for teenage insecurities or tender moments for wedding dances. As I listen to "Calm Through the Clearing" by Canandaigua, the divergent folk based project of Washington, DC based filmmaker and singer-songwriter Raul Zahir De Leon (formerly of Stamen & Pistils, Radel Esca, and Dead Artists), I am reminded that they can be much more. As the song moves like a lively wanderlustful waltz done up sort of lo-fi sounds as rustic as a battered country porch and with Raul's understated, yet earnest vocal aesthetic, the song sneaks up on you. Apart from the sing-a-long tones, Raul's poetry interweaves glimpses of what might be a dozen stories. The general sense of sadness starts to filter in through the cracks, the cracks in our emotional armor. Raul sings of joy and pain but I feel the numbness of a sad book being closed, a resolution that while we can control a lot of things in our lives, there is a whole lot more we cannot, dire things, horrible things.
This particular passage stays with me
"Woke up this morning the blues in my bed / The radio man tells of another child dead / streets swell with sadness, swelled with sorrow / enraged for all this repeating tomorrow"
and the final lyrical coda:
"When will the past be taken as such / A wretch of a beast, we stay in its clutch / The grip of the pain, its hers and its his and all the while seeming to say, "That’s just how it is” / When do we, become truly free / Delivered from oh such iniquities / The road remains long, and may outlast us all / one foot ‘fore the next till the day that we fall"
Those things we cannot control from our histories past and present and future might be the hardest thing to wash off late at night and not being able to resolve the despair that hangs in the darkness like cold eulogies can leave us numb. "Calm Through the Clearing" is coated with a patina of pain and pushed my mind in a hundred directions. For whatever reason, I thought of Salinger and Eady, of Dylan and TV On the Radio, of Henry Rollins and The Dead Kennedys, of "Get Out" and "The Outsiders". I don't expect to understand the connections of all these disparate artists and art pieces. What I do know is that Canandaigua's lo-fi folk journey "Calm Through the Clearing" touches me and chips away at that numbness. It is another art piece for me to treasure.
Canandaigua releases his EP "Slight Return" on August 6th (2021)
-Robb Donker Curtius
Bandcamp
YouTube
SoundCloud
A District of Columbia-based filmmaker and singer/songwriter, Raul Zahir De Leon has always been inspired by individual stories that highlight the American experience; particularly those that evoke the breadth of challenges and struggles evident throughout this country. His lo-fi folk songs pull from a variety of influences and elements, blended into a sonic tapestry uniquely his own.
Canandaigua kicked off as a solo project, although on occasion enlists a rotating chair of friends to join in. The project builds on the poetic narrative storytelling De Leon employed in his previous outfits, Stamen & Pistils, Radel Esca, and Dead Artists.
Over the years De Leon has shared stages with a diverse list of artists such as Dirty Projectors, Akron/Family, Beach House, Yacht, The Blow, Telepathe, Asobi Seksu, and more.
Additionally, as part of the Wilderness Bureau collective, De Leon helped launch music sites All Our Noise, and Bandwidth, the latter for NPR member station WAMU. De Leon produced and directed countless video session performances and interviews by a wide range of artists such as Kevin Morby, Sharon Van Etten, Mac DeMarco, Sylvan Esso, Death, Rodrigo Amarante, The Dirty Three, My Brightest Diamond, Mount Eerie, Julie Doiron, and many more.
No comments:
Post a Comment