[International] Glass Heart String Choir: New Single/Video 'Wounds'

7 Oct

KATIE BROWN - 7 OCT 2021

Glass Heart String Choir Wounds — *PHOTO: RYAN J. SALVA*

Newly released this week is gorgeous and thought-provoking new single “Wounds” by Seattle art-pop duo Glass Heart String Choir. Intricate and delicate interweavings of strings, piano, acoustic guitar and airy backing vocals provide a fluid and lush soundscape-like bed for vocalist Ian William’s almost plaintive melody to take root in, as his poetic lines hover against the track like the outreaching branches of a tree. There’s a sanguine comfort in the timbre of his voice along with a dose of melancholy, and it suits the meaning behind the track perfectly as it wrestles with the cyclical damage caused by inherent wounds lying latent and unaddressed at the core.

In speaking of “Wounds”, Katie Mosehauer, the pair’s violinist and composer, explains, “There are so many emotional spaces that we occupy alone, carrying a burden of psychic wounds and emotional scars that we never speak of to anyone. Music is an important place to give names to those spaces and make them visible to everyone. Wounds creates a world in which anyone who has or is sitting with those lonely emotions will have a friend sitting with them to celebrate the escape, to mourn the setbacks, and to offer a 2’30” reprieve to share that space with someone who understands.”

Describing themselves as “friends-in-arms revelling at the intersection of classical virtuosity, existential poetics, and art-film surrealism,” the pair each hold their own unique strengths that they bring to the songwriting table. Coming from a background of classical music as a trained violinist, Katie has found herself evolving into a multi-instrumentalist as her musical and artistic world expands, and alongside composition, takes on art direction and engineering duties for the duo. Holding up such creative pioneers as Werner Herzog, Leonard Cohen and Salman Rushdie as inspiration for bold and at times seemingly reckless risk-taking, Katie believes in pushing into the bigness of ideas to discover the magic hidden at their deepest depths.

Meanwhile, Ian is the wordsmith and poet, creating context and meaning for these beautiful and flourishing creative worlds to meld into and flow around. A quiet type whose thoughts need to take a clear shape before they translate into speech, he explores verbosity through the emotion captured in song and allows this process to become a more multi-faceted method of communication.

“When I can refine my emotions through these songs, I feel like I can speak with eloquence and complexity,” Williams says. “And when Katie and I communicate, whether performing live or in our letter-exchange of evolving recordings, there’s always a sense that we’re weaving a tapestry, an elaboration... it’s a language that I feel I can speak better than that of everyday conversation.”

Such a unique pairing certainly makes for an especial rarity in their music, which holds all of these facets within it in a particularly compelling manner. To be able to build visual worlds around ideas is a special gift, and this is reflected with sensitivity in the accompanying video to “Wounds”, with its sun-soaked Joshua Tree and Coachella Valley visuals. Directed by Katie, the video features her in the role of one wrestling with memories who constantly finds herself drawn back to the same pool, which should be a source of refreshment and respite from the heat, but instead becomes a trap, neatly tying back to the idea of emotional wounding and scarring we all carry inside, and what it does when left unaddressed.

Not just a work of flowing beauty in and of itself, and it certainly is that, “Wounds” marries this beauty with an emotional honesty and depth that is sincere and moving, and one can’t help but equate this to the symbiotic collision of the two in their musical pairing. Like all that transcends, the magic lies in what is allowed to rise up and take form through the combination of the unique ingredients each contribute to the alchemic recipe of their music.

Watch the video for “Wounds” below.

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