Following “The Mirrors Were Right” launched last fall, this second track from the group formed by Paige Barlow, Miles Dupire-Gagnon and Gabriel Lambert (from Hippie Hourrah, Elephant Stone, Anemone, The Besnard Lakes) reveals another hypnotic and solar facet of a first album to come under Simone Records later this year.
The stories we tell ourselves that are often opposed to the realities we experience; the experiences that we would like to share, but which are only lived inside ourselves; the memories that we probe to learn to live with our selfhood: so many threads that run through “Phasing”, a hypnagogic dream pop piece by the Montreal band Hush, available now on listening and download platforms.
I’m facedown in the spacesof sky lies to face up toIn eyeline with the headlights,I realize without a doubtSpellbound, serpen-timesSpell out what we’re up toBroken lines of water,In your fountain of youth
An impressionist vignette combining micro and macro, atom and sky, “Phasing” highlights the crossover poetry of Paige Barlow – who here attempts to connect fragments of life, as if they were succeeding one another in a stereoscope. In a diaphanous, airy and fulfilled voice, she probes the intermittences and variations of our experiences and our feelings – “I love you is just a phase and / I’m phasing in and out” – by questioning reciprocity, even, the necessity or sustainability of what binds us.
An evocative, applied title: if, in the text, “Phasing” refers to the phases of our relationships, we also feel in the composition and arrangements of sinusoidal undulations, a sort of perpetual movement. Miles and Gabriel deploy a rich and deep sound tapestry, made of solar movements: the themes of the piece come, transpose and return, thanks to techniques of speed variations on tape as well as the hybridization of analog and digital production technologies. An immaterial confluence of dream pop and trip-hop, the piece flows smoothly, as if we went from waking up to nighttime in a few minutes without ever extricating ourselves from a second state, both liminal and luminous.
The extract is coupled with a video clip developed by Paige Barlow and Aabid Youssef, taking up the lens blur effect and the contrast between the infinitely small and the larger-than-us which are at the heart of the song.
Directed by René Wilson and Miles Dupire-Gagnon, recorded by the latter and Samuel Gemme (Corridor, La Sécurité) then mixed by René Wilson with the assistance of Samuel Gemme, “Phasing” is the opening track of Hush’s first album, expected later this year under Simone Records.
ABOUT HUSHBorn from the meeting between Paige Barlow, Miles Dupire-Gagnon and Gabriel Lambert, Hush is part of the new wave of artists who are redefining Montreal psychedelic pop. Their sound universe acts as a prism where art rock, jazz, krautrock, surf music and dreamy pop are transformed into a material that is at once cinematic, sensitive and deeply human. Like an image captured in its movement, Hush’s music invites us to look more attentively… then challenges us to look away.