Ginla – “Carousel” ft. Adrianne Lenker – Song of the Day

Mōrena music lovers, check out the new music video from gilna accompanying their new single “Carousel”.

Here is their outstandingly poetic blurb with all the details.

Today the cross-continental duo ginla announced their forthcoming second full-length album, Everything, alongside the release of a new single and music video “Carousel,” featuring vocals by Adrianne Lenker, lead singer and guitarist of indie-folk icons Big Thief.

Out March 25th, 2022 on their freshly-minted label No Content, the new album finds the band mining their roots as instrumentalists, conjuring existential lyrics, lush soundscapes and a dream-state fog; an ambitious contrast to their electronic-leaning debut (2018’s Codex) for Terrible Records.

ginla’s Jon Nellen explains: “This song was written at the top of quarantine. I was dealing with the ideas of mortality, consumption, life-planning, destruction–all things we were forced to confront in some way during the beginning of the pandemic. The idea is that all of these are revolving and evolving elements in life, like a carousel spinning in circles. I didn’t plan on writing this but it sort of spilled out subconsciously in a couple days in early April.”

ginla’s music floats enigmatically in the space between sleep and waking life. Like a car speeding down an empty highway at dusk, the band’s songs carry an otherworldly momentum. And yet, the obliquely existential lyrics, and lush soundscapes, seem to float languidly through the listener’s mind, like the waking dream of a dozing passenger, who, slumped against the car window, is vaguely aware of the foggy shapes speeding by, familiar yet alien.

After completing most of the record together in Brooklyn just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Joe Manzoli and Jon Nellen had to work creatively to finish the rest remotely, as they were marooned from one another on opposite sides of the US-Canada border. With the mixing assistance of Rusty Santos (Animal Collective, Panda Bear), this unusual production process would generate ginla’s most captivating release to date.

The songs on Everything speak in tongues, simultaneously reaching both the conscious and unconscious minds of the listener. Contrasting feelings seem to blur together, as past, present, and future merge into an eternal now. The music feels intimate, yet mysterious, a gorgeous statement on the often baffling experience of simply being a mind, alive in the world.

The band’s second single, Carousel, features Adrianne Lenker of Big Thief as a guest vocalist, singing in a gentle unison with Nellen’s calming baritone.  The feeling of a dream-like highway-to-nowhere pervades Carousel, as Lenker and Nellen sing, “Blue skies drape the silver van I drive down 85 but I’m lost again” over shimmering acoustic fingerpicking and otherworldly background vocals that swirl like mists above the highway.

At the heart of Everything, there is a deep need to see boundaries dissolve: the boundary between wakefulness and sleep, between the future and the past, between the self and the other. Like a zen koan, the album offers us a hint that, behind the curtain of the familiar, we will always find the incomprehensible. The message is simple. To understand your place in the world, you must look inward. Only then will you see yourself unravel, revealing that underneath it all, awaits Everything.

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