"This life is soft to mold / But we carve it out of stone / Give our hands to what they hold / And our freedom to the cold..."
Mike Deni aka Geographer has just the right stuff, the perfectly fleshed out voice, made up of sinewy emotional muscle and coursing blood and crying tears for his complex, rich songs filled with melancholia, existential threads and glistening hope. On the song "Got It Wrong", from his new album “A Mirror Brightly”, he brings all those aspects of that voice with his contemplative lyrics studying the truth and consequences of our world constantly in flux and maybe on a crucial tipping point. Personal but in a reflective way like dipping into the communal consciousness (or thereabouts) he explores the muck, pushes through and offers, if not solutions, possible resolutions.
Deni shares: “This record takes that existential shock but explores it through humanity as a whole, rather than just me as an individual.” The title, he adds, “refers to the lights of the phone shining in our eyes, blinding us to ourselves, obscuring the truth. It also refers to the beauty of this life. That is the glimmer of hope on the record. It leaves the option open that one day we might turn the light back away from our faces to illuminate the darkness that surrounds us.”
"Got It Wrong" takes no time to get started, it trust falls into our arms. As beautifully sad as the piano shapes are as a basic framework for Deni's vocal presence, the strings are powerful to the point of acidity, burning into our brains like pure turmoil. The juxtaposition between the caustic punches and the beautiful gospel of the piano and voice is striking. There are softer orchestrations too, a dance, a waltz of sad resolve and sparkling orchestrations that dance on it's toes, hope and sunlight.
To accompany the song, Deni filmed a stunning video for the new track, “Got It Wrong,” which takes the emotional storytelling of a tear-jerking film like Old Yeller and reimagines it in a setting like Color’s Studio in Berlin. Mike adds, “This video is the last day that I spent with an old lamp before replacing it with a new lamp. I actually wrote it as an IKEA spec commercial. No one asked me to, and I don’t make commercials, but I just thought, what a beautiful commercial. Bring the audience into an alternate universe where people have deep and complicated, somewhat parental relationships with their lamps, and show someone giving their lamp one last perfect day before its light bulb dims forever. I can’t believe everyone was on board with the idea. But I think they all saw what I was going for, we were so in sync after making four other music videos together. The Director of Photography, Christian Klein, really created that balance between the two worlds that I was going for. I was inspired visually by Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, those scenes that are plays that are alive. And somehow it fits the song perfectly. I hope someone who watch it will come away pondering the attachments we form and whether their arbitrariness is beautiful or reductive.”
Geographer always impresses me with his songwriting resolve, prolific output and desire to make us all feel what he is, bloodletting as catharsis and provoking us to feel instead of not.
But what if we got it wrong
What if there really is a God
What if the answer’s in the stars
And one day we’ll shake our bodies off
I could be your effigy
Raise me high above the street
Set ablaze for all to see
Nothing in my heart
Raise me high above the street
Set ablaze for all to see
Nothing in my heart
-Robb Donker Curtius
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM
https://twitter.com/geographermusic
https://open.spotify.com/artist/5vvvgOwPjA4R5t07ZXLLwZ
https://www.youtube.com/c/geographermusic/about
https://www.instagram.com/geographermusic/
https://www.geographermusic.com/
Geographer is the moniker for Mike Deni’s American synth pop/indie rock band. Formed in San Francisco in 2007, Deni has described his sound as being “soulful music from outer space” using analog, electronic, and acoustic elements to craft dense layers and unique sound textures.
The project began when, in 2007, Deni relocated to San Francisco from New Jersey, after living with the aftermath of the sudden and tragic death of his sister, and then the equally unexpected death of his father a year later. While sleeping on the floor of his friends’ apartment in the Haight, Deni found a synthesizer on the street, and began to channel both his grief and his optimism into the songs that would become Innocent Ghosts. This theme would continue through all his music, which pits intense and emotionally probing lyrics with momentous and soaring arrangements, often featuring electric cello. The Animal Shapes EP put Geographer on the map and launched his career. Since then, Geographer has headlined many national tours, played Outside Lands, Firefly, and other festivals, released two critically acclaimed albums, and performed with such musical luminaries as K.Flay, The Flaming Lips, Young The Giant, Tycho, Ratatat, Betty Who, and Tokyo Police Club.
In April of 2018, Deni gave up his apartment in San Francisco, and spent the next 6 months without a home, hopping between tours and friends’ couches, and spending a significant amount of time in his hometown, before eventually moving to Los Angeles in September of 2018. During that time of shiftlessness, in limbo between his old and new life, Deni wrote the songs that would become his EP, New Jersey. Many of the songs began where he grew up, and were finished in Los Angeles at his friend’s house while he was looking for an apartment.
Following the release of ‘New Jersey’, Geographer remained active, releasing a slew of singles throughout the rest of the year. Now he is back with a new full-length album, Down and Out in the Garden of Earthly Delights set for release in 2021. The odyssey of the album explores the pleasures and pains of life while testing the depths of the human condition.
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