RAVEN MAHON and Mikey Young began making beautiful music together after a chance encounter at a gig in her home state of California; at the time they were both in other bands, Raven in Grass Widow, who had an LP out on the koool Kill Rock Stars; Mikey as a member of Australian post-punk synthers Total Control.
Their new project, The Green Child, began as an extremely long-distance musical correspondence; in case you’re wondering, they took their name from Herbert Read’s 1935 utopian, communist, sci-fi novel of that name. Yes, there’s intelligence and concepts at work.
A lovely, self-titled album emerged two years back; in the interim, Raven’s headed for the Southern Hemisphere, where they’ve been brewing up a second set of seductive, off-kilter, otherworldly synth-psych.
That album, Shimmering Basset, will be with us in just over a month’s time; in order to lure you into their world, they’ve just released a second melodious and off-kilter confection in the shape of “Fashion Light”; watch the video, below.
It’s got synthpop shapes, but bent and blurred, all in the service of Raven’s quirky, choppy lyrics; “If in/ certain /circles / we pay / dearly,” she sings … it has the tonal quality of really good British synth pop circa 82/83, but you’ll also get hints of a weirder aesthetic … moments of scifi soundtrack, of The Field Mice, even. It’s curious and quietly addictive.
Raven says: “‘Fashion Light’ is about how, in the company of someone new, a map of attraction forms from flashes, a taste, gestures, insight, collaged into a personality and a connection. And when the process is forced to sit and wait, the gestures become memories and then anchors holding everything intact until it is accessible again and really knowable.
“The video is made up of two sets of images: the external static images in a period of waiting and watching, while movement is impossible; and then the internal moving images, the animated sequences of the things happening on cellular levels, when the action can just be imaginary. The link is the body of water and the messages it transports back and forth.”
The Green Child’s Simmering Basset will be released by Upset The Rhythm on download, CD and vinyl formats on October 23rd. Place your order at the label’s shop here.
