{artwork by Laura Carim Todd}
SINGLE: “Brujo Chueco”
Release Date: June 24, 2020
Label: self-release
Pre-order: https://sephy.bandcamp.com/
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BIO
Sephy is a new project from Joel Sephy Gleiser, whose songs are born from mathematical, mantric explorations with his piano (think John Adams or Keith Jarrett). Sephy is impressionistic, psychedelic, meditative pop music for thinking and dancing. With a unique approach to melodies, harmonies, rhythms, production, timbres, and lyrics, there is not a boundary the music fails to push. The lyrics defy the conventional and are as much in the realm of the metaphysical as they are political. Sephy’s music explores the meaning and meaninglessness of life, love, family, words, time, and home – the known and the unknowable.
At the core of these themes is an exploration of home. Joel Sephy Gleiser is a descendant of immigrants, who themselves were descendants of immigrants. His Colombian parents and Argentine grandparents felt ostracized and fearful for being Jews, just as his Polish, Romanian, and Lithuanian great-grandparents felt (rightfully) fearful. With lyrics in English, Spanish, and Spanglish, the listener is left to understand or fail to understand based on their own knowledge, and demonstrates the experience of otherness he has felt his whole life. It is from this perspective that he writes in his song “Brujo Chueco”:
“Si quieres, te lo cuento otra vez
Si quieres, te lo cuento en revés
Si tu ni sabes quien eres, you don’t even know who you are.”
[If you want, I’ll tell it to you again
If you want, I’ll tell it to you in reverse
Since you don’t know who you are, you don’t even know who you are]”
In today’s political climate, so many in the United States have (selectively?) forgotten their own ancestral histories of immigration—their own escapes from terror to opportunity. For Sephy, the ancestral memories and inherited traumas are impossible to ignore, and are vital to understanding the world. In the song “Me Creo, Me Creè,” Sephy elaborates on the theme of what is inherited and what can never be passed on:
“Nacimiento. Crecimiento. Si me creo, me creé solo.
[Birth. Growth. If I believe myself, I made myself.]
Mis ancestros me persiguen. Y mis sobrinitas me llevan por la mano
[My ancestors chase me. And my nieces take me by the hand.]
Ser el ser que conocistè, tantas noches me dijiste que tu amor es más que estos abrazos.
[To be the person who you knew, so many nights you told me that your love is more than these embraces.]”
With piercing vocals over top of virtuosic, geometric, and looping piano patterns like rhythmically twisted salsa montunos or Thelonious Monk, the song swirls and teeters on the edge of control and chaos fearlessly. Expanding on the psychedelic pop music of such geniuses as Björk, Animal Collective, Juana Molina, Radiohead, and Jorge Ben Jor, Sephy always seeks to break new ground and expand the possibilities of the art of sound.
PRESS QUOTES
MUSIC
Buy/Stream “Brujo Chueco” here:
“Brujo Chueco”
The art/music of Sephy explores the dissolution of time, languages, tones, and harmonies. It is a search for a different future, inspired by the infinite spectacles of nature. The natural world does not understand convention, but often follows a path of least resistance. As such, the geometric, swirling piano patterns, changes of dialect, and morphing synth timbres in Sephy’s debut single, “Brujo Chueco,” follow instinct rather than formula.
The imagined Brujo (wizard) beckons you deeper and deeper into the darkness of your own mind until the light behind you is gone and the only lights that remain were those stars made invisible by the noisy external world. In the void, he reminds you of how great and how small your existence is. “You don’t even know who you are.”
Before we can know who we are, we must acknowledge that once, we were nothing, as unknowable as God. And we will be nothing again. Hidden within this and many of Sephy’s works, are messages of political dissent and in support of nature over nationality, perfection, or materiality.
MUSIC
Stream/Share “Brujo Chueco” here: https://fanlink.to/BrujoChueco
PHOTOS
