On her 2016 album debut Open to Chance, Kayla Cohen, the songwriter and guitarist who records and performs as Itasca, introduced us to the wide landscape of Southern California, a long way from clichéd desert truck stops and neon signs for motels. Following that release, she left her home in Los Angeles to live and write for two seasons in a century-old adobe house in rural New Mexico. The press release for her forthcoming album titled ‘Spring‘ (out on 1st November on Paradise of Bachelors) shares the reasons for the urgent drive behind the move:
The move from one Southwestern desert to another resulted from a set of dire circumstances, both personal and societal, not least of which was the sense, shared by many, that a sinister cabal of impaired lunatics had irredeemably poisoned the already sour well of our American discourse. She decided to drop out and dive deeper—hiking into the mountains, through fragrant juniper and piñon forests, past groves of golden cottonwoods, to the source of what she calls in the song “Cornsilk”—with a nod to poet Clayton Eshleman—“the canyoned river.” Inspired by the landscape and history of the Four Corners region, the resulting album, the sublime Spring—its title summoning both season and scarce local water sources—dowses a devotional path to high desert headwaters.
Like Clayton Eshleman who became fascinated by the Paleolithic imagination after being introduced to ancient painted caves, Cohen was also deeply influenced by her surroundings away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. Isolated and sheltered by the foot-thick adobe walls, Cohen sought something different, more ancient… In the accompanying video for ‘Only a Traveler’ which was shot on Super 8 film, that feeling of remoteness and slowing down of time is inescapable, surrounded by such vast and ancient landscapes it’s easy to imagine how deeply meditative such an experience can be. Cohen invites you to join her as she shared the following on the video:
“We shot this video on Super 8 film in New Mexico and California. It’s influenced heavily by the opening sequence in Heart of Glass, the film by Werner Herzog, which shows blurred scenes of Bavaria, Germany and Yellowstone National Park, against a soundtrack by Popul Vuh. Heart of Glass was a “visual key” for my understanding of how video can interface with music. In the case of Only a Traveler, I hope the viewer can allow and enter a meditative state, to contemplate the slow movement and soft colors of the film. The image reflects the story of the song, which describes the conflict between the city mindset and the desire to walk out onto the furthest mesa untethered.”
If Open to Chance felt moonlit, spectral and spooky, Spring sounds positively auroral, luminous, a brisk early morning walk through lucid daylit dreams, a series of vivid visions in thrall to the dusty New Mexican terrain.
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