Soul Bandit – Queen City Sounds and Art

SoulBandit2_crop — Soul Bandit, photo courtesy the artist

Soul Bandit’s single “Sleeping 2 Dream” sounds like something from the future when someone will look back on the four decades leading up to now and mulch all the musical and pop cultural references and assemble an aesthetic that is coherent sophisticated and considered imbued with a classic pop sensibility. The dazzling flow of sounds generated by various electronic instruments, some of them circuit bent, and production blurs the line between rhythm, melody and texture in a way that suggests a deep familiarity with all the elements to the point where they are compositional tools to employ in imaginative songwriting and not merely a cool gimmick. Creatively it makes one think of perhaps the type of artist that does comics or manga, then animation and then the music for such. Or film auteurs like David Lynch, Sophia Coppola, Gregg Araki and John Carpenter who not only create striking and powerful cinematic works but who are at least deeply involved in the music direction if not in composing music for the soundtrack as well. There is a fragile elegance to the composition of “Sleeping 2 Dream” that conjures imagery of dragonflies and the way they seem so delicate and composed but are stronger than they appear. The beautiful layers of the song suggest the same for itself. Insect metaphor aside, the song is about that time of life when strong feelings nearly overwhelm you and you don’t yet know how to articulate them or speak them in public so you dream of the times when you can with all the strength of your emotional core. Listen on Spotify and follow Soul Bandit at the links below.