You may have heard of the herb sage, from flavouring your food or cleansing your aura. Similar to smudging sage, the music of SAGES is flavoured and cleansing but in a more synthetic and sonic sense.
SAGES is the reflective electronic solo project of singer/songwriter Racquel Hardy, who hails from the forests of small town Mono ON. Fans of Grimes will easily be swayed by Hardy’s knack for capturing sounds in the natural world and then sampling them. Twisting them into our digital sphere and glitch-ing them out with beats that’d make Purity Ring jealous. With two self-released albums already under her belt (2014’s Creatures of the Sea and Saturated from 2015), the most recent release from SAGES was her 5-track EP, titled Strawberry Crystal, November 2016.
And now? We here at Sidewalk Hustle are thrilled to premiere “A-VOID” the first single off Racquel’s upcoming album How To Fill It, due out Feb 3rd, 2018. Written and produced by Hardy, the bombastic track also features cheeky, existential lyrics from Toronto/Nova Scotia/Olympia incubated lo-fi rap artist Fresh Flesh (Zoe Solomon) and is accompanied with a music video, animated and created by Julie Reich of Toronto’s Bile Sister.
Here’s what Fresh Flesh told us about the track…
“The song is about my pattern of avoiding everything till the last minute and then getting fired. Its about avoiding life by subscribing to the status quo.”
The video’s creator Reich also had this to say…
“The song has a starkness and I wanted to represent the musical and conceptual Void visually. Zoe’s lyrics really resonated with me, “Get a job you’ve got to stay employed, get destroyed you’re just a humanoid, don’t avoid the void …overblown, better charge up you’re phone sell everything that you own cuz nothing beats being alone don’t avoid the void”. It’s easy to feel pretty isolated as a poor artist in a big city. The outcome is a strange 3-D perception of planets in space. As for my style, I’m self-taught in the world of 3-D animation and as a result, my approach is not bound by rules that may restrict creative process. For this video, you are witnessing my experimentation with skins and capture methods.”
Watch the trippy video Reich made for “A-VOID” by SAGES featuring Fresh Flesh below.
The new SAGES album How to Fill It will be released Feb 3rd, 2018. Stay tuned for more!