Shelf is the soundscape of the space between dissociation and belonging.

Shelf

"Amends" explores self-mercy and accountability after the second stage of grief: Anger. It is a nod to what I’ve learned through years of therapy about the power of naming. It is a fearless moral inventory, an understanding of the effect on self and other, an odyssey through four and five of The Twelve Steps. My recovery journey has been riddled with shame that still lives in my bones. The final line of the song is an attempt to exorcize this shame from my body. By acknowledging the ruins of my Anger, I am attempting to destroy the destroyer.

Amends

“Raven’s Song” is a reflection on a time when I existed in a state of limerence, intersecting with the third stage of grief: Bargaining. It is an interplay between fire and water that takes place at night, in darkness, in a forest by the river.

Spirit Photographs

Raven's Song

“The Throne” is an allegorical love song. It is about ​a mercurial mind grappling with the Acceptance of a helping hand, an open heart, and a kind love. It represents Acceptance as the final stage of grief.

The Throne

In a landscape where post-rock is very male and instrumentally dominated, Spirit Photographs responds and challenges the genre by being vocally and emotionally driven. The EP is a post-rock/drone folk concept album about grief. Each of the five songs represents one of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ stages: denial (“June”), anger (“Amends”), bargaining (“Raven’s Song”), depression (“Solitude”, a Black Sabbath cover from the seminal Master of Reality), and acceptance (“The Throne”). Through this model, I explore processing the personal turmoil of my mental health disability in an era of collective trauma. The title is inspired by spirit photography, a spiritualist practice that was popular after the Spanish Flu. The medium claimed to show spirits and ghosts of dead family members behind the portrait’s subject. Spirit Photographs blends this concept with the roaring twenties, a century later.

Despite its melancholic subject matter, the album is about strength. It is an exercise in naming ghosts in order to vanquish them. Its purpose is to capture a triumphant portrait of grief with the intended outcome of demonstrating metamorphosis through acceptance of struggle, turning the narrative of suffering upside down.

Spirit Photographd

Solitude

June

Bridges

Vocally driven post rock drone folk textures that weave through gigantic feelings.

Gillian Stone

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