Premiere: psych-folk man Historian broods on the unsettling ‘Quiet’
Psych-folk musician explores what silence means with his new song.
There is more to silence than a blanket of nothingness. Only through the clashing and thrashing waves of stillness can we examine our real truths, turning over our shells in our fingertips and tracing back through time and space. In quietude, enlightenment can flourish and expand its roots in the earth of humanity. Deafening pops and fizzes wash over our senses on a daily basis, from the rattling of network TV to constantly spinning social feeds, but psych-folk musician named Historian (real name Chris Karman) claws his way between the static to rediscover what it means to be alive. “Quiet” reverberates off the skull and wriggles in its brevity, somehow emerging as far more profound than it possibly could otherwise.
“Silence, what a waste / I waited / I need a sound,” he sings, heaving, in well-measured whispers, his foggy breaths dropping like glass on hardwood. Strings snarls and snap underneath the gurgling ripple of the arrangement, and even as a voyeur, of sorts, you begin to understand his vantage point ⏤ one of tremendously feverish unease. On the song, premiering today, he tells B-Sides & Badlands, “‘Quiet’ was my attempt at a meditative, gently mournful examination of the absence of sound. It’s a bit of a paradox to write a song about silence, but I was in a strange state, writing late at night during a time when I wasn’t sure where I was heading. I felt like I was waiting through an interminable silence for some kind of movement in my life.”
He’s a plainspoken man, a product of Los Angeles, but one who has tirelessly trudges through the muck and mire of life and music industry, glancing ever skyward for solace in the serenely greying atmosphere. The clouds gather and whip across the blue sea. But now, casting it all aside, he’s a commanding presence in such a stark, almost minimalist, structure. “For such a short song, its origins are actually fairly complicated,” he adds. “It started as a lengthy, slow-burning folk song. I eventually re-wrote it on synth and turned it into a concise elegy.”
“Quiet” samples his forthcoming new album Hour Hand, out Feb. 15, the sister set to last year’s Distant Wells.
Listen below:
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