Photo: Catalina Xavlena
Oakland electronic artist Chrystia Cabral aka SPELLLING has shared the first single ‘Haunted Water’ from her forthcoming album Mazy Fly, set for release early next year. Both poignant and defiant, it’s a downtempo yet intense track characterised by its foreboding production and Cabral’s soaring voice and idiosyncratic delivery. It remembers and wraps itself in somnambulist style around the inhumanity of the Middle Passage, European colonialism’s horrific practice of dishonesty, division, kidnapping, forcible transportation which resulted in the mass murder of at least two million African men, women and children across almost three centuries. The survivors would end up enslaved on “hell on earth” coffee, sugar, fruit and cotton plantations in the Americas for expensive upper class European tastes.
The album itself questions the mind bogglingly fast, contradictory and destructive nature of human “progress” since this practice and its direct beneficiary and successor, the Industrial Revolution. Such “progress”, has encouraged, strengthened and expanded systems of greed and their technologies have brought us to the brink of wholesale environmental destruction. Cabral ponders the hopes and discoveries that have also driven part of this history in an attempt to artistically uncover and represent possibilities for renewal and real human progress amidst what will be a bleak and dark future should the current practices of shortsighted greed, acquisitiveness and avarice continue to be rewarded.
Listen to ‘Haunted Water’ below and pre-order Mazy Fly here. Mazy Fly follows up Cabral’s 2017 debut Pantheon Of Me and is out February 22 on Sacred Bones Records.
Tracklist
1. Red
2. Haunted Water
3. Hard to Please
4. Golden Numbers
5. Melted Wings
6. Under the Sun
7. Real Fun
8. Hard to Please (Reprise)
9. Afterlife
10. Dirty Desert Dreams
11. Secret Thread
12. Falling Asleep
Haunted Water
SPELLLING (USA)
From the forthcoming album, ‘Mazy Fly’, Sacred Bones. Out Feb. 22
Audio Stream