Chalcedony’s single Dollandia off recent ep “capsule” is a distorted dream state tangle of live-off-the-floor trippy noise, moody yet tempting lead vocals, and haunting doll lullaby backups.
With the aesthetic and lyrics inspired by cult classic film “Valley of the Dolls”, the song is also a nod (pun very much intended) to mental health and prescription medications for depression, anxiety, insomnia and sleep disturbances such as night terrors, sleep paralysis and hypnogogic hallucinations. Dollandia, being the escape...but with overuse, consequences follow.
The single and ep was recorded and mixed by producer Felix Fung at Little Red Sounds in New Westminster, BC last summer. Dollandia’s single art features an original custom painting by drummer Vanessa Gidden. Cate Whatever, Gillian Callander and Vanessa are also currently self-producing the forthcoming music video for which they will be directing and art directing.
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Dysmusia is an Irish musician whose sound blends the heart of Antrim folk traditions with a modern edge of indie-rock. Based between Antrim and Dublin, he carries the influence of both rural roots and city creativity in everything he creates. Born into a deeply musical family, he picked up the guitar at just eight years old, teaching himself to play while surrounded by the rhythms and melodies of Irish country and show-band culture. His father performed in show bands, one brother took to the drums, and the other to bass—music wasn’t just a hobby in the household, it was the family language
I grew up in a mixed corner of Ballymena, though the wider town carried strong voices and stronger traditions, where difference could feel quietly magnified. On warm, still early‑summer evenings you’d hear drums drifting across the air, part of the atmosphere, even if not our world.
I never felt fully one thing or another, always slightly out of step, a lifelong minoratist. Later in Dublin I was still gently set apart, a ‘Nordy’ by shorthand, as if belonging always came with a small condition. My music comes from that in‑between place, the margins, the echoes, and the quiet ache that settles in as youth slips into memory.
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| Photo - Nico Hedley |
released today we have the first single "Love U The Same" from the debut full-length by Brooklyn singer-songwriter Izzy Oram Brown. As a fixture in the Brooklyn indie scene, Izzy Oram Brown has been featured as a collaborator in rising bands such as Why Bonnie and Youbet. Stepping into her own with her full-length, What I Want is full of unexpected surprises and moments of instrumentation and sound design that go way beyond a singer-songwriter affair.
“Love U the Same”—a plainspoken, broadly strummed pop ballad and the emotional highwater mark of Izzy Oram Brown’s new LP What I Want—sketches out a journey toward accepting emotional paradox. Singing in hushed but soulful tones that bring to mind Christine McVie, the Massachusetts-born, Queens-dwelling songwriter returns to chords that she reframes in every verse, setting up a resolution that never comes, mirroring the lost promise of a broken compact between lovers who really tried to make it work.
An ambiguous chord, neither bright or despairing, frames both an admission of hurt and bittersweet statement of re-devotion (“But no matter what I do or say, you’re with me.”) It is only after the narrator accepts that only time can make mutual empathy and acceptance possible that the harmony settles and the arrangement expands: “If we tire of the work/of finding who’s to blame/I will remember/I love you the same.” With its nostalgic, carefully arced melody and lyrics, the song holds pain, contradiction, and a genuine warmth of spirit easily. It’s a combination which often eludes even the greatest artists who write about romantic wires getting crossed.
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