OKLAHOMA CITY – The last, lingering days and weeks of the year can be a special and strange time, an almost indefinable liminal space on the calendar where priorities fall away and the walls between things feel thinner.
The short days and long nights form a unique blur of holidays, weekend celebrations, early bedtimes, and half-awake workdays that all blend into a swirling, colorful waking dream that only wears off around January 2nd.
So it’s not exactly easy to find the right music that captures that feeling in a melody, an attitude, or an atmosphere, something that can appropriately soundtrack that inevitable late-year delirium.
But hark, for our own Oklahoma artists have done it once again, with some of our most deeply creative and expressive locals (and semi-locals) dropping some recent releases that evoke that same quiet mystery, frantic energy, and wistful reflection that we all feel come late-December.
Sweetest Pot – ‘What a Night’ EP
Sweetest Pot has been on a tear lately, with a near-constant stream of singles and drops throughout the year’s last quarter, each showcasing their unique ability to chop, distort, and deconstruct a song into something still achingly emotional and human.
November’s “What a Night” EP collects four such tracks, combining lo-fi electro, trance-y break beats, and blip-borne melodies into the kind of late-night, multi-color bulb-lit landscape that matches the holiday lights and year-end reflection perfectly.
In fact, all of the moods, feelings, and even track titles here feel like an invocation of the season, from the winter wishes and winter rains to dancing, memories, and even Oklahoma’s staggeringly colorful winter sunrises.
I’ve been saying for awhile now that Sweetest Pot is surely one of the most musically exciting and melodically rich acts in the OKC scene, but this EP and the more tracks that have already followed throughout December prove that they’re also one of the most prolific.
Hobbyist – ‘Demo.nstration #1’ EP
Sweetest Pot’s Mystery Class labelmate Hobbyist may be splitting his creative energies between OKC and Denver these days, but we still claim him and his off-kilter, oddball electro-pop as our own.
On this first volume of his already continuing “Demo.nstration” series, collecting and burning off some long in-limbo experiments and productions, the man known to music fans as Hobbyist (but known elsewhere as Fletcher Zaragoza) dives headlong into everything from deconstructed bedroom beats to bouncy, driving quirk-pop.
Taken together, it’s a great overview of the scope of his powers in translating and interpreting different grooves through his filter of left-field electronica, but the chopped, funky standout “New Things” best captures that weird liminal feeling of the in-between days at year’s end, like the music you’d hear in some temporal, dimensional waiting room.
And if all that sounds intriguing, you’re in luck, because Hobbyist has already dropped the next installment of the series, featuring “Unwilted Stutter,” one of my favorite tracks from this year’s first-ever Mystery Class sampler.
Lauren Sonder – ‘Missing’
It’s possible that still no other instrument can express the full range of experience and emotion all on its own quite like the piano, and composer/pianist Lauren Sonder is using that fact to wring all the longing, connection, and heart-swelling, ethereal space out of it that she can.
The four-track song cycle that comprises her EP “Missing” (from way back in September) utilizes only the piano by itself and the reverberations and ambient spaces that curl around it to explore the injuries of absence and distance.
The result is one of the most quietly affecting and deeply felt Oklahoman releases of the year.
In just 17 minutes, Sonder employs her delicate, sparse arrangements – marked by minimalist melody lines and circular chord cycles – to develop something hypnotic and unavoidably gripping, with the wide open spaces between notes and chords becoming an instrument of their own, the patience becoming part of the composition.
If classic ambient music is meant to become part of the environment around a listener, then “Missing” may be the exact opposite, effectively blocking out the surrounding world entirely and replacing it with one built from the vibrating airs and intertwining frequencies of the piano until it all drifts away completely.
You can find out about local music and performance happenings in the OKC metro weekly in this music column by Brett Fieldcamp. | Brought to you by True Sky Credit Union.
Brett Fieldcamp is our Arts and Entertainment Editor. He has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for 15+ years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
