Veel vinden we nog niet terug over deze Californische Cassandra Walter. Wel dat ze ergens in 2012 een band genaamd Semi Sweet had en sinds 2015 verder ging onder de naam Girl Grave. De toon werd een stuk donkerder en de bijgaande video's steevast stijlvol, artistiek zwart-wit. In mei dit jaar bundelde ze haar songs op een 6-track EP die je HIER gratis kan downloaden!
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Een woordje uitleg
For Cassandra of Girl Grave, the immediate surroundings of the living world are the only truths a person can really accept. Common ideas of what happens to a life when it passes are mere aphorisms to her, and there really is no black and white explanation concerning life and death, only grey.
In Cassandra’s music, the same holds true. The mood and musical color is not bright with hues of shining light, but rather smoky waves washing over the listener in a full spectrum of greyscale. Despite Cassandra’s natural tendency towards a more monochromatic artistic coloring, there still exists a delicate melodic quality of deep red equivalent to the color of spilled blood, or the haunting blue glow of the full moon, or the emerald green of a deep bottomless lagoon—all of which inevitably return to a hazy black. The combination causes the music of Girl Grave to be deeply felt. Every inflection is intensely alive with yearning and romance, visions of vivid lucid dreams, hushed desperation, cryptic passion, mixed with a shiver of futile surrender. The unspoken idea is prevalent; the things a person loves might silently simultaneously kill them too.
Cassandra’s musical mood may be somber, but her compositions remain stylistically elegant, full of drama, dynamics, and self-awareness. Kindled from the literary and real-life elements around her, she explains, “A lot of times I won’t tell people how I feel, I’ll just keep everything inside. I think that’s where some of the romantic elements of the songs derive.” It is the chaotic energy of the outside world that ignites these inner conflicts that Cassandra cannot elude. She embraces the emotions that plague her, encapsulates them, and releases them in the form of song. “Music is therapeutic for me, in getting out what I maybe wanted to say to someone a long time ago—it always comes out in the music eventually.”
With the aid of producer Justin Morales, Cassandra’s reveries become reality. This down-tempo dark pop band from Southern California, lead by Cassandra on vocals, guitar and keyboard, has solidified itself as not only a notable music project, but an overall artistic force. Morales explains their process as a balance of interlacing moods, “that are not completely opposing, like dissonance and elegance. New music and videos are being released on their website
(Kim Conlan)
