Mothlight by Alexander Ortolan

“Can you catch it there?”

So asks Alexander Ortolan in the first line of ‘Mothlight’, the title track of his debut E.P., his brooding, baritone voice lingering above a bed of uncertain orchestral swells. The song itself was the answer to its own question, in a way; the breaking of an internal silence, a writers’ block that felt ready to calcify into permanence.

Seemingly out of nowhere, emerged ‘Mothlight’ and its dusky, vertiginous sensuousness. Imbued with the “heady perfume of decay”, it captures equinoctial walks among the lengthening shadows of early evening, the faint apricity of changing seasons and the liminal spaces between sex and death.

‘Mothlight' is accompanied by a promotional video shot on super 8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzAWdF3uZQM

The altogether less nocturnal ‘Not Today’ is a surly, lounge-tinged dispatch from a gloomy spring day, world-wearily sardonic yet ultimately optimistic (albeit in the quietest possible way).

The instrumental ‘Stolen Apples for Karen Blixen’ (written as an unofficial soundtrack to the Derek Jarman film of the same name) pits shimmering strings against chiming synth, giddily swelling through bittersweet harmonies into something bordering on the ecstatic.

Rounding the brief collection off, the instrumental version of ‘Mothlight’ (wryly subtitled ‘Karaoke Version’) invites you to be enveloped once more in its warm but ambivalent gauze (and perhaps hum along, should you care to).

Singer-songwriter of existential chamber pop.