.When was the last time you listened to a completely unfamiliar piece of music?
A song that has not been recommended by an AI music robot, or shared on your mate’s story. When was the last time you stumbled on a piece of music and listened to it with no pre-conceptions, completely open to where it may bring you?
I ask this, because I’m not sure if I have ever been to anywhere like this before. That’s what happens when artists push themselves into new mediums, rebirthing themselves. Scarlett-Rose, a performance poet and multidisciplinary artist, with poetry featured on BBC Words First, Gaydio and BBC Radio 4, is breaching unfamiliar territory of music with a debut EP.
The opening track Prelude tells a tale of a utopia where working-class consciousness arises from the underbelly to the stars, winged and blessed with hidden beauty. Where ‘alleyways are a rite-of-passage’, ‘graffiti tags are cave drawings’, angels live amongst ‘the man with no teeth at the local pub’. What is sketchy turns into sketches of Scarlett-Rose’s melodic vision, the bare bones of what the world could look like if poverty’s grime was priced like gold dust. Prelude works like a trailer, preps you, unnerves you, opens up a whole world within a 1 minute 5 second track.
In For the Others, Scarlett-Rose throws you into the audience of a gritty pantomime; but it’s really hard to stay sat down when the grooves are this heavy, hypnotic, fast, and relentless, that I want to join the stage; To take control of your own experience no matter where you start, I think that’s what this track is about. It slowly builds like an ascension of sounds clumping together, then disperses like specks of dust on a gust of wind. Menacing guitar riffs swell and twang like spidery jerks of a marionette that you can no longer control, as gun shots are spat into the air.
The next track What We Have narrates falling into the mass pit of poor mental health as a result of poverty, a depth filled with the screeching swell of inflicting rhymes against rhythms, voices granulated to conjure everything from spoky-esque trills to grunge plucked basses. A response to seeing those suffer with what they have, Scarlett-Rose mouths ‘All this biting dust puts gums to bleed’, stitching words into protext, as fragments of the spoken and the sung croon through the ether, whispering and resisting the fate of the working-class. The track is studded with sudden bursts of breathy spittle, that dance against a backdrop of fragile tones and stunted syllables of ‘scabbed souls’.
The last song on the EP Our Darkest Secrets is hopeful moment as we say goodbye to the world; a harlequin has found love in the grit, and a way out of the pit. The industrial base in the previous tracks evaporates into birdsong. And we sit, finally a moment of euphoria, ‘Watching the old worlds turn yellow as they die, like it’s a sunrise.’
If there ever was a purpose for creating music, this feels like it. Isn’t this how hope is made? Seeing beauty in the grit, pulling out the hidden gems, and maybe even an odd feather.
