What God Doesn’t Bless, You Won’t Love

A child walks among the leaves to freeze at the sight of the winged thing. Its black arms spread wide between trunks and trees, its neck cocked to the side with the posture of a stone. The child’s tiny fingers curl tight in defense to the enormity of the situation at hand. Frightened, the child stares as the winged thing begins to bend its legs to the sound of the drum sounding off within its bowels. Bending notes begin to flow out through the winged thing’s up shaped beak to bring his long lost bird relatives out from hiding atop the branches. The caws and coos begin to trickle off the tree limbs from above dropping wet sounds of rain upon the child’s skin. They are gentle beings these winged things.

Shedding’s new album What God Doesn’t Bless, You Won’t Love; What You Don’t Love, The Child Won’t Know has been a companion of mine for the last month. I went in alone on this one knowing that what lay before me was a trip through the other world where we paint and create our own languages, the world we left so long ago. When we were children it was so easy to escape into that world, where beasts lived in trees and among the shadows in the hallway. There are things that only children see but there are also secret passages, chutes and ladders, which some art allows for us to ride making us visitors into that world that we once knew so well.

What Shedding’s Connor Bell has done with this record is create a collage of “micro-sampled” jazz with appropriately placed bird songs and mimicry of the like. The record, though challenging if listened to proactively, is a rewarding, hypnotic guide to the other world of your choice. And coupled with the dark fantasy artwork of the gifted Kathleen Lolley it is no wonder that others are finding Shedding’s new work to be nothing more than absolutely bewitching.

[www] Shedding – GB
[www] Shedding – Less Than Natural Wash (from Dead In The Water)
[www] Shedding – Raindrops Revisited v.2 (from Now I’m Shedding)

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