Time to relax
Jessie Atkinson
15:48 22nd October 2020

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Listen to me: you need to relax. Whoever; wherever you are. Drop your shoulders, unclench your jaw, have a glass of water. It's a difficult time, and times can be difficult enough regardless of the wider landscape.

If you're reading this, no doubt music is one of your coping mechanisms. Though we hope that your support system is wide, music is definitely a good place to start. Today, if you feel like you need to take out your brain and put it in ice water, give Samana's stunning new EP The Spirit Moving a listen. 

It's fourteen minutes of trembling, gorgeous folk. Here's Samana to tell you more about it.

The Spirit Moving EP

‘The Spirit Moving EP’ is an interaction with the realms of the soul. All three songs are improvisations, being immediate impressions, lifted from the dialogue of the subconscious onto 1/4 inch tape. Carving out the contours of instinctive emotions and poetical intuition, they are conjured from the transcendental ritual of creation. Each song is a journey, a message, a philosophy, a deliberation, preserved and imprinted into its own sonic landscape. Together, they conjure an observation of the spirit moving through dimensions of time and existence, and into the search of being. The spirit moving marks the beginning of a year long release cycle where we will be sharing one song every month, throwing convention out the window to the nights’ sky, where darkness, mystery and wonder greet us all at the gate.

'Passing Me By'

‘Passing Me By’ is an exploration of improvised performance, laid to quarter inch tape. It is the subconscious musings of many a day spent wandering the meandering hills of the Midi-Pyrenees during lockdown, offering an insight into our artistic, inner workings during the three months we were holed up in France. We lent a large part of the sonic qualities of the music to the South Barn where we were both living and recording and paid the utmost attention to the very performance of the core of the song, which began as a one-off vocal and guitar take. We then left both ribbon microphones in situ and orchestrated the rest of the instrumentation within the space they occupied. The song itself is raw and instinctive and speaks of the velocity of time passing in fragments of visions and feeling. 

'The Glory Of Love'

‘The Glory Of Love’ is as much a mantra as it is a prayer to love. Inspired by old gospel songs from the 50’s, it is an unapologetic portrayal of the rerooting of the soul within the self and the shedding of the very veneer of everything in life which distracts us from ourselves. As an improvisational piece, the performance of the song represented an exorcism of apathy, numbness and emptiness in the very returning to the fundamental principle that lies at the heart of all things -the profundity of what it is to truly love, and to be loved.   

 

'The Spirit Moving'

‘The Spirit Moving’ is a reflection, a poem, and a conversation with the soul. It is an immersion into one's interior alchemy; a divination of the psyche, of existence and of purpose. As the final improvised piece of music to complete the E.P, it conjures a metaphorical mountain  and traces the perpetual flight of consciousness.

The Spirit Moving EP is out now.

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Photo: Press