Tag: Wim Wenders

Mary Ocher Entreats the World to Awaken to its Human Solidarity on Operatic Art Synthpop Single “Syhmpathize”

Mary Ocher, photo courtesy the artist

Mary Ocher’s single “Sympathize (featuring Your Government)” is well represented in the music video that shows the artist floating in a turquoise ocean on a rubber raft looking like a character from the end of The Lord of the Rings who has returned from the Undying Lands in white robes and rams horns. Nearby a cluster of refugees from the ravaged world frolic on an island of junk with a “For Sale” sign while industrialists in a red ship demonstrate their designs on what’s left of normal people. All while Ocher sings “Sympathize with us!” in entreatment to the basic humanity of those who might just snuff out what there is left of a world not completely unconquered by rapacious economic interests. Musically Ocher’s operatic vocals and beautiful pulses of synth melody and circular rhythms are reminiscent of something Lene Lovich or Nina Hagen might have written for one of Jim Jarmusch’s or Wim Wenders’ more eccentric and engrossing globe hopping films. Watch the video for “Sympathize” on YouTube and follow Mary Ocher at the links below. Her new album Your Guide to Revolution releases on June 14 in the EU and in the rest of the world on July 19 via Underground Institute.

Mary Ocher on Facebook

Mary Ocher on TikTok

Mary Ocher on Instagram

Hanna Ojala’s “Call for My Soul” is a Healing Ritual of Personal Mysticism

HannaOjala_MainPic1_Crop
Hanna Ojala, photo courtesy the artist

Every time Finnish sound artist Hanna Ojala’s releases a single you’re in for a unique experience and one that doesn’t often draw immediate comparisons with other songwriters. With “Call for My Soul” you can’t help but imagine sepia toned landscapes and a structuralist film aesthetic like Wim Wenders and Laurie Anderson collaborating on a film about a great journey to a place where you face your darkest fears and embrace your greatest dreams. Her vocals, like spoken word free verse poetry, uses repetition to emphasize the emotional experience of memory and a yearning to reconnect with one’s core and one’s sense of identity and self-value. The poem moves over a layered ambient drone and impressionistic piano as though the song was informed by a visual sense of storytelling and the vocals and music echo slightly like deeply subconscious connections lapping at the shores of your waking mind and nourishing an awareness of what might soothe a sometimes faint sometimes powerful sense of unease at being out of balance with who you are. Probably everyone has this sense of existing in a way and in a social context that does not nurture who we are but pushes us toward what seems most “useful” or efficient as if our existence is only justified by its utility to an economic system, an ideology or some other dominant belief system imposed on everyone. Ojala’s song suggests that you can harbor within you an independent sense of self-value from the cruelty and disconnectedness of the world and in doing so recognize and encourage the same in others. Listen to “Call for My Soul” on YouTube and connect with Hanna Ojala at the links below.

soundcloud.com/h_mo
youtube.com/channel/UCOciWsXO_7cDSrveFlwSmkA