Surreal by Octavian Winters

Randy Gzebb and Stephan Salit first created the slow, melancholy progression that was to be the core of Surreal. To me it had a beautifully dark and watery feel, like being caught at night on a foggy ocean. The first words that came to me as I was working up the vocal melody were “it’s surreal, so find a way”, and I thought it was curious that I couldn’t seem to get away from those words and make anything else feel right. Usually I will start with the melody and placeholder lyrics, but in this case it came at once, from the start, and those words stuck. I started to unspool the feeling behind them: the idea of being disconnected from everything and everyone, and feeling like you can’t quite put your finger on objective reality. I feel this is a distillation of many people’s experiences over the last three years of lockdowns and schism. The song also explores the theme of the “in between”, or existing in a state that is neither here nor there, and in which it is impossible to tell what is real and what are just projections.

Octavian Winters was born into the ghostly isolation of San Francisco in 2022, during the third winter of the pandemic. Octavian Winters weave their visceral and ethereal sound into a texture all its own – of stories once told but half-remembered, under a dusk of shadows and stars, in an abandoned city under the winter moon.

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