Dana Sipos – The Astral Plane
Roaring Girl Records – 25 June 2021
Listening to The Astral Plane by Dana Sipos is like listening to the sun. How do you describe something that changes your perception of things? Throughout this album, Sipos plays with the nature of what we know and experience, changing perceptions and forcing reassessments of what we think we know. Rather than answering questions, she opens doors, allowing us to look in. Judgements can be made later; for now, the idea is to experience and reexperience moments lived.
Hewing a line that combines the worlds of jazz and folk with lyrical visions that refuse to follow straight lines (much like the world we live in), Sipos finds ways to create images that refuse to go away. Light In, Moon On enters with wonderfully skewed piano and bass creating a jazz vibe. When she finally begins to sing (some 45 seconds into the piece), the song opens in a vision suggesting entry into a less than simple world, “Don’t let the light in, don’t let the moon on/ I just want to sit with the darkness for a little bit / The day has fallen down.” Her language is specifically and mysteriously precise.
Sometimes more visions than songs, what emerges is a picture of a woman, a family, a world that has never quite been exactly what it seems to be. The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who fled Hungary during the 1956 Communist Revolution, Sipos has a perspective that many lack, “During their escape from Hungary they were thrown in jail, sent back, escaped again; my mother was drugged to stay quiet on the journey and almost didn’t survive. They arrived in Canada with $5 sown into a jacket pocket and didn’t speak a word of English.”
While that is part of the story, it is by no means the entire story. “Skinny Legs” serves as a goodbye letter to her grandmother, asking questions that have no answers. Examining her upbringing on a farm in southern Ontario, “Greenbelt” explores how trauma has affected her family. “Light Around the Body” offers a musically complex world akin to Nick Drake, complete with visions that can shake your view of the world, “Light around the body/ Is choking on eucalyptus and rose/ Velvet hand milks the deer/ Queer lake is on fire.”
Rather than feeling obscure and distant, The Astral Plane is a remarkably intimate album. Having been given a look inside the complex relationships that exist between people, families and their intersections within the natural world, emerging without answers, we are asked to look inside ourselves. More importantly, we get the opportunity to listen to a woman examining things that matter. That Dana Sipos has made The Astral Plane so accessible is a tribute to her ability to translate a world of experiences in a way that helps us to understand that while we are all unique, we are also all connected and examining those bonds makes us all stronger.
The Astral Plane was released on 25 June 2021 via Roaring Girl Records. Order via: https://www.danasipos.com/
Dana Sipos also opens our latest show Lost in Transmission No 74 – Listen here.