&Tilly – Queen City Sounds and Art

&Tilly and BlauDisS Elicit a Deep Sense of Existential Drift on Dream Pop Song “Chaotic Neutral”

Pulses of melody course through &Tilly and BlauDisS’s single “Chaotic Neutral” like drifting photons of tone, trailing in the field of hearing. In the music video the singer seems to be sitting in a bathtub and contemplating a moment adrift in a mood, in a state of being. The title of the song is perhaps a reference to the alignment in Dungeons & Dragons most motivated by impulse and being neither malicious or guided by a particular moral framework that one would identify as “good” it can be difficult to predict. But in real world terms it might encapsulate a sense of being adrift when most things that have anchored anything to values or a system of values has been eroded and you can easily get to a place in the mind when you start to wonder if anything has any inherent meaning and if anything is truly worth doing except what intersects with your mind in any given moment. Most thoughtful, sensitive people who may have once really believed in something only to have the foundation of that thing or set of principles supporting it undermined and discredited. This can be a cultural, societal, political, spiritual or interpersonal thing that was at the core of your sense of self and if you don’t have a solid sense of self separate enough from any of those things you can feel like it’s all nonsense even if for a short or extended period of time. The song’s gentle rhythms and melancholic moods suits a sense of disconnected yearning that remains when you’re not sure if anything matters but you can sometimes feel like you want something, anything, to resonate with you deeply. Watch the video for “Chaotic Neutral” on YouTube and follow &Tilly at the links below.

&Tilly and BlauDisS Weave a Downtempo Pop Song About Dreams Deferred on “right//left”

&Tilly and BlauDisS, photo courtesy the artists

&Tilly and BlauDisS team up again for “right//left.” A dreamlike, hazy background drone serves as almost an emotional canvas but one more reactive and dynamic upon which the vocals sing a tale of desolation and melancholic yearning set to a downtempo beat and minimal piano melody. The song was written from the perspective of the daughter of Sarah “Sally” Hemmings, Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved lover. The song seems to reveal a person who can see the future of echoes of the more radical rhetoric of the day, but words those living in the then present who write and speak them lack the will and power to see them realized in the literal phrasing. The line “Won’t get free/A hundred years/Fulfills these dreams” is poetic and quietly powerful in framing a deferred liberation and at least a slightly better world. In the music video we see our singer wandering sideways and backwards in lonely, tiled halls looking dejected and distressed. Is it a commentary on how in some ways in many places our own modern history of civil rights has taken some steps back in so many places and using imagining the hopes of someone who might never live to see the freedom that seems so obvious and logical as a lens through which to examine the present? Possibly but the song itself can be appreciated as a gorgeously immersive song that soothes the mind while not dismissing one’s concerns with performative bravado. Watch the video for “right//left” on YouTube and follow &Tilly at the links below.

&Tilly’s Video for New Age Dream Pop Single “In Circles” Transports Us to an Aquatic World of Tranquil Contemplation

&Tilly’s video for “In Circles” was shot entirely on iPhone but its color palette and textural detail looks like something that could be part of an A24 film set in parallel universe. We see a figure seeming to be floating on and in azure waters with visuals of luminous, aquatic invertebrates floating gracefully about and a shoreline of darkened trees. The music itself is elegant layers of processed piano, sublimely subtle guitar and ethereal percussive sounds and hushly melodious vocals. Perhaps even plucked violin to give it all an even more classical sensibility that lends the song a timeless aspect like something that could have come from a more pop 90s New Age alternative music realm for fans of Enya and Loreena McKennitt or newer artists like Cate Le Bon or Julia Holter. But &Tilly’s sound is also in the realm of dream pop but with more than usual mastery of sonic details masterfully orchestrated. Watch the video for “In Circles” on YouTube and follow &Tilly at the links provided.

BlauDisS and &Tilly Ease Us From Post-Exhaustion Wakefulness to the Tranquility of Dreams With “3 AM Lullaby”

You can hear distant voices through the white noise and hazy melodic tones before the vocals come in like someone contemplating imponderables during those late night hours trying to follow a path from tiredness to the spiritual tranquility of dreams. The percussive bell tone loop sounds like the turning of the internal clock while the hours stretch on when you feel maybe too tired to sleep which sounds counterintuitive. But this collaboration happened between producer and multi-instrumentalist BlauDisS based in Washington DC and art pop/multimedia duo &Tilly based in Slovakia with the former experiencing perpetual sleep deficits due to being a new parent and the latter perhaps due to insomnia. And, honestly, anyone that suffers from health issues that make falling asleep difficult or a terrifying possibility before the body and the brain are in sync to make that happen and you end up being up later than you would like and during that time one’s brain and perceptions run in unusual ways, like an altered state of consciousness. This song with the ethereally melodic vocals and layered loops of rhythmic sound and drones not only parallels that unreality but serves as a musical soothing of the mind making an easing of the transition from extended consciousness into sleep seem possible rather than an ordeal as though the collaborators dipped deep into their experience with the phenomenon to craft the kind of music you’d want to hear to put your body and mind at rest at the same time. The music video (below in both forms) is like a hypnogogic fairy tale offering vivid images that are reminiscent of the kinds of situations and scenes you’d see in a dream like the faces of strangers but having an easy communion with them even in the most unusual of situations that would never likely happen in real life like wearing a diving mask to walk in the park. It’s difficult to compare this track to much else as a touch stone except for maybe the early work of High Places when the compositions were more intuitive and organic and seemingly sprung from the stuff of the subconscious mind, suffused with warm and gentle melodies and informal rhythms. Watch both videos for “3 AM Lullaby” on YouTube and connect with &Tilly at the links below.