Next month, Vancouver songwriter Jasper Sloan Yip will release Strange Calm / Blushing Autumn; a pair of EPs that ruminate on themes of life and death. Today, he shares two more tracks from the double EP, “On The Beach” and “Oleander”.
“The six songs that make up Strange Calm attempt to deal with the death process," says Yip. ""I imagine them as a psychic journey to the beach to greet the end of the world. The beach is the perfect place for endings: it is the edge of one world and the start of another. In ‘Oleander’ we find ourselves standing in the water, swaying to the pull of the moon, gazing upward at stars that will surely ‘forget all of our constellations’. In ‘On the Beach’ we float through the ‘wild motion’ of this new frontier, affirming that we can ‘separate the water from the waves’ before looking up one last time “as the constellations drift apart and lose their shape” to say that we ‘would do it all again’. There is a lot of anxiety in the first four songs of Strange Calm. I was really struggling when I wrote them. But I'm glad for all of it, it led me to a place of gratitude, and that's what these last two songs are about."
Listen here: https://music.jaspersloanyip.com/onthebeach