There’s that section in the 2005 Flaming Lips documentary The Fearless Freaks where we’re shown publicity photos of the band wandering in a psychedelic landscape and they’re referred to as these trippers and weirdos when Wayne Coyne really wasn’t someone into psychedelics. But that aesthetic and sentiments expressed and the complexity of impressions resonate with the music video for the latest Half Shadow track “Song for the Garden” (from the forthcoming album At Home With My Candles due out April 7, 2022 on Bud Tapes & Dove Cove Records). Jesse Carsten sits with an acoustic guitar in a natural landscape of rock formations, beaches, drying plants, woods in the near distance as animations layer over the top of the footage and images collage together in sync with the way his vocals meld and melt together with the warping background melody and the processing of his own vocals. The lyrics poetically describe what seems to be a mystical experience with the spirit of the natural world itself as an aggregate entity of which we’re never really apart except in the limited and self-involved cognition of typical human consciousness. The music is somewhere between ambient pop, cosmic country and psychedelic folk and wonderfully not choosing to fit into a narrow genre. It’s a song that washes through your mind and makes the truth of being connected to a larger existential context obvious and impossible and unnecessary to resist. Sonic touchstones perhaps worth mentioning would be solo Syd Barrett, Orbit Service and Legendary Pink Dots but best experienced for yourself so watch the video on YouTube and follow Half Shadow and Carsten at the links below.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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