Jasper Sloan Yip’s latest offering is as moody as a rainy day in his hometown of Vancouver. The atmospheric double EP is full of ethereal harmonies and resonant strings while Yip tackles grief, heartbreak, and inevitable endings, all pinned to downbeat languid rhythms.
As with all endings comes new beginnings, and within this sense of struggle are edges of hope. Yip summarizes the album as “a meditation on learning to live with the death process,” as well as the birth of new life and a new chapter – specifically, Fatherhood.
The new double EP, Strange Calm / Blushing Autumn emerged from the liminal period after the Strange Calm sessions at the Noise Floor had been cut short by COVID. In the midst of isolation, Yip recalls how the second EP came to be.
“I felt that what we had made was finished, but also that there was more to say. So with nothing written and not much to go on other than a desire to create, I committed myself to recording a second EP at Afterlife Studio in Vancouver with producer and longtime collaborator John Raham (Destroyer, Tanya Tagaq, Frazey Ford). Almost immediately after doing this, my wife and I learned we were going to be parents the following summer, and from that point on there was nothing else to write about. What resulted was Blushing Autumn: four quiet songs about the anticipation of new life.”
The next challenge was how to go about making collaborative music in isolation. In the weeks leading up to the sessions, Vancouver’s COVID numbers were trending in the wrong direction, depriving Jasper and the band of an opportunity to workshop the material. Rather than fret, the band decided to lean into the circumstances, inviting cameras into the studio to capture whatever happened under the guidance of filmmaker Lester Lyons Hookham of C’est La Vid Productions. “That was an exercise in trust,” says Yip. “I was already nervous about recording untested songs, but we decided to embrace the opportunity for spontaneity in the hopes we’d capture something special on film, and I think we did.”
Jasper has hinted at a much larger film project still in the works for 2022. For the time being though, he is sharing footage of the sessions as a music video for “Blushing Autumn”, showing the band in situ, joyfully creating together in-studio again after a long separation.
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