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about
Randy Gzebb and Stephan Salit first created the slow, melancholy progression that was to be the core of Surreal. To me it had a beautifully dark and watery feel, like being caught at night on a foggy ocean. The first words that came to me as I was working up the vocal melody were “it’s surreal, so find a way”, and I thought it was curious that I couldn’t seem to get away from those words and make anything else feel right. Usually I will start with the melody and placeholder lyrics, but in this case it came at once, from the start, and those words stuck. I started to unspool the feeling behind them: the idea of being disconnected from everything and everyone, and feeling like you can’t quite put your finger on objective reality. I feel this is a distillation of many people’s experiences over the last three years of lockdowns and schism. The song also explores the theme of the “in between”, or existing in a state that is neither here nor there, and in which it is impossible to tell what is real and what are just projections.
lyrics
Our hands are just connected bones
Our voice is breath and now it's blown
It exists in the in-between
Where no one else but you believes
Doesn't capture anything that's real
It's surreal, so find a way
Our hearts are unconnected stones
Now a devil's here to bring us home
All that's left is the unrelief
Of the hate that's your belief
Doesn't capture anything that's real
It's surreal, so find a way
credits
released September 15, 2023
Ria Aursjoen: Vocals / Keyboards
Stephan Salit: Guitars
Randy Gzebb: Drums
Jay Denton: Bass
Written and Performed by Octavian Winters
Lyrics by Ria Aursjoen
Flare and Bloom Music BMI
Stratis Capta Records
Recorded at Studio OW, San Francisco, CA
Vocals recorded by Mark Pistel at Room 5, San Francisco, CA
Mixed and mastered by William Faith at 13 Studio, Chicago, IL
Produced by Octavian Winters and William Faith
Special thanks: Eric Olson Design, Jason Electric, Kevin Bottaro
Octavian Winters was born into the ghostly isolation of San Francisco in 2022, during the third winter of the pandemic.
Octavian Winters weave their visceral and ethereal sound into a texture all its own – of stories once told but half-remembered, under a dusk of shadows and stars, in an abandoned city under the winter moon....more
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