by Chris Hatch

Taken from her upcoming mostly-ambient album, the wonderfully Spoonerised, Mia Gargaret, Chicago’s Gia Margaret has this week released two absorbingly compelling new songs – “apathy” and “body”.

With the kind of pillowy textures that were marbled throughout previous album, There’s Always Glimmer, Margaret uses a mixture of instrumentation and found voice samples to explore the way our internal emotions reflect and manifest themselves externally. It’s a roomy, considered approach that hits closer to home than you would first expect – “apathy” in particular harbouring the cloud-parting feel of exiting a gloomy headspace, and feeling the dawn break on a renewed outlook; a snippet from a singing lesson highlighting the connection between the internal and external. ‘Even if it’s just doing something to get out of the body’, her teacher says, ‘Rolling your shoulders, as you’re doing it. Just something to get out of it, to feel just free in your body and let things just come out the way they want’. It’s as much therapy, as it is vocal coaching.

“body” lights up its initial, twilight drone with sparkling luminescent synths that paint an iridescently-lit, sunless cityscape, over which a disembodied narrator muses over the physical constraints the body can put on our philosophical and emotional capacity. It’s a more direct approach, as Margaret lets her dreamy, echoing keys float away in an attempt to cut the string between her earthly shell, and let her internal self rise free. ‘My body is a burden to me,’ we hear, from spiritual philosopher, Alan Watts, ‘But to whom?’ he continues; if Margaret’s upcoming release attempts to explore these themes of emotion, spirituality, and philosophy further, it will no doubt be another enthralling, illuminating delight.

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