Photo by Jon Weary.
Kristine Leschper's music has taken a happy turn. Her last album as the frontwoman of the Philly-via Athens, Georgia post-punk four-piece Mothers was a disturbing and arduous listen that found her fantasizing about leaving her mortal body behind. But so far, everything from her forthcoming solo debut, The Opening, Or Closing Of A Door — especially today's offering, "Picture Window" — has an open, airy quality, as if by shedding Mothers' rock-band trappings, she's regained a long-lost element of wonder.
In the project's bio, she describes a sensation of rebirth: "an understanding of how to relinquish control in a big way, and from that, a new sense of connectedness, transition, and impermanence.” Following the path of the New World Poets, she's working to develop what June Jordan explained as "a reverence for the material world that begins with a reverence for human life, an intellectual trust in sensuality as a means of knowledge and of unity."
In "Picture Window," The Opening's lushest single thus far, Leschper indirectly answers the question presented persistently by Sammy Weissberg's buoyant bass line, fleshing out a child's experience of the writerly sublime, her voice sounding lighter than ever before. Leschper, Weissberg — who also arranged the track — and drummer Garrett Burke underscore her vocals with a hand-clapped polyrhythm; two flutes and a string quartet enhance the nature scene; and Leschper's lovely synth chords complete the picture.
"I was thinking about how effortless it felt to commune with the mysterious as a child, especially in the ‘natural world’ as we call it, as if it is something alien to us,” Leschper says of the track. “I was thinking about my sister, our shared experiences of childhood, and I wanted to create a sonic environment that felt like that."
The track comes with impressionistic visuals: a brook babbling across various rock formations, hands arranging sunflowers on a table, Leschper spinning in circles in front of a barren tree.
"It was obvious to me that the video should embody the same character of discovery," Leschper explains, "that it should slow me down, get me out into the world to look for something unfolding, and I settled in on the quiet drama of a stream. I shot time-lapse photographs and compiled them into video sequences, a meditation on time or timelessness. The resulting video is uncomplicated, things are constantly changing and yet nothing happens; I spin indefinitely in a circle, a stream bubbles on into eternity.”
Watch it below.
