Pastel
Pastel’s own Gabriel Brenner is back with the hauntingly beautiful new single “silhouette” featured off the upcoming absent, just dust EP available August 25. A deeper ambient move from 2016’s beloved Bone-Weary EP (Very Jazzed)—Gabriel grapples with their own Native identity, histories where the fabrics of the past collect together as both the canvas & paint that are bonded together in the face of current day trials & confrontations.
This aesthetic motif carries on further in “silhouette” where the image of a Native woman depicted on a card conjures up reflections on belonging, colonialist/settler conflicts, and the obfuscation (if not elimination) of cultural identity through the passage of time. Gabriel allows the synths to breathe in an arrangement of a sacred assemblage of atmospheric sound where the sustain & hum of Brenner’s voice and elongated melodies stir a solemn moment of pause in the listener’s consciousness. Pastel’s concepts of the self & others in the world contemplates the long shadow personal histories cast where the contemporary climate often only gives a vague shadow-like glimpse of our own origins. Gabriel pressings through the vagaries with a devotion committed toward a better understanding of our own histories as people & as a collective world that will hopefully lead us all toward a greater & more enlightened ground.
As I watched thousands of Native water protectors, cornered on a bridge by militarized police armed with a water canon, I found myself wordless. I felt fiery anger, disgust, hopelessness. I cringed at the journalist’s descriptions of the subzero temperatures, watching as icy bullets barraged the crowd below. I understood this brutal violence as yet another extension of a never-ending settler colonialism. The ideas and feelings were there, and yet, speechless.
My mother is part Pima and my father is part Cherokee. Historical and generational traumas led to silence about it on both sides of the family. Wordless. absent, just dust came out of a reoccurring desire to craft a language around this loss. Thus, lyrics are sparse on this EP, and when there, gesture towards an idea instead of pin it down. Gave me a card/painting of a woman with a feather in her hair. What do postcards signify, and how do they circulate? How are Native women depicted in popular culture? At times, voices are whispering, stuttering, inarticulate (“stammer”, “silhouette”); other times, they are angry, roaring, confrontational (“haunt”); always, they are ghostly, hanging heavy all around but just out of view. With absent, just dust, what I realized is that this loss is a language itself. It is a language that one must sit with and parse through carefully to pull meaning from, a process I will perpetually repeat regardless of how much I come to know about my history, my people, and myself.
[The EP] absent, just dust will be released on August 25th. An extremely limited run of 20 cassettes will also be available for purchase. Half of all proceeds made will be donated to FreshetCollective.org, who have provided continued legal support to water protectors since the founding of the Sacred Stone Camp.
#NoDAPL
