surreal

Saturn Stars, recently released by The Boy In The Rose Garden is a testament to resilience.

22nd May 2023 — Leave a comment

Why make someone your whole universe when you’re not even a star in their galaxy?

The Boy In The Rose Garden

You’ve fallen in love with a person that feels like a party. The lights just seem to find them, they know every word to the songs on a stranger’s playlist, each beat they move expertly to. The drinks are sweet and your surrounded by friends, time is moving too quickly on the night you don’t want to end but then they’re still at it yet it’s 6 am you wonder when you’ll be home again, your glass is empty and your ears are numb, but their eyes are searching for you, so you continue to move, smile stuck to your face.

You dance, you drink, you stay for them because leaving arm in arm is better than leaving alone. You feel as though you’re in love with a ghost but being haunted is better than being abandoned. Your world is built for them whilst you’re barley a yard of tarmac in theirs, but that doesn’t matter because at least you are there and when their eyes find yours you exist and, in that moment, you know you are everything. You spend your time finding ways to find that fire, you want to burn for them.

In their song Saturn Stars artist The Boy In The Rose Garden explores similar semantics, falling for the person that dropped you, hoping they’ll be the one to catch you. You are only the person of their dreams because you only matter to them when they’re asleep.

Boy in the rose garden

The ethereal vocals entrance you just as the previous lovers once had, you’re death to the eery undertone, a sinister nod to your foreboding future, a sound that places you in a disorientating mist, the confusion of what is is to be in love with someone who seemingly once felt the same for your but now sees you as thick dust on the fireplace, noticed just before a guest comes over.

Their words whip into you, but you’re just happy to bleed for them, to show them you truly love them, to show your devotion as they turn their back on your bones, you’ve learned to feel at home with the sense of being alone. Let go? Would you let go of all that you have When all you have to your name is a stone it becomes a jewel, a throne. You’re home a haunted house full of whispers of who used to roam the halls, figments of what once was but can never be again, the bare body of what could have been, where you throw your keys and lay your head. You had nothing, they provided you with a rag, you use it to wash my skin, bandage your wounds to cover your frail frame as you lay to rest. Holding out your empty hands and your full heart you declare, “this is all I have, and it is my kingdom, if it costs me my life it will have been worth it”.

The Boy In The Rose Garden

If you were a candle, you would set yourself alight to aid their journey to bed in the dead of night. If there were no food in the fridge you would volunteer your soul to keep them fed until Sunday. If all their clothes were to rip you would peel off your skin to keep them. Loving them is the passion that comes with knowing you would give yourself up for them to go on, for who are you to take from the living?

You are the whisper to their crowded room. A crease in their new shoe. You’re being held close, but your being used as a shield protecting them from themselves, what weapons id you bring to a war you did not know you would be fighting? Every bullet they shoot at you reflects how they view themselves, and you willingly make yourself a larger target, convinced you can take it if they promise to love you. That’s all you ask, love me you cry as they feast of your flesh, love me you beg as they wash their hands with your tears, love me you weep as they use your body as a punching bag, at least when they touch you, you are worthy.

Self produced, Saturn Stars ,in itself, is a testament to resilience, an audible lighthouse when you’re in the depths of the dark sea, just because you’re drowning does not mean you should grab onto the first thing that feels solid, a rock will just drag you down deeper, find your lifeboat.

With antoher song coming out in june 2023 promises to be a successful year for The Boy In The Rose Garden. Stay up to date with their releases by follwing them on social media.

(If your situation sounds like this there is help out there. Please reach out. You are not alone.)

Gabi Garbutt Soars with the release of her Debut EP The Creation Of The Birds.

28th Apr 2023 — Leave a comment

See the world from the other side fo the wing.

Gabi Garbutt

The influence of art in understanding our surroundings is hard to quantify. Despite the rise of social media, the immediate gratification so easily accessed from a ten second video spiel, it is still common to see satirical comic strips reflecting the structure of our current climate. We digest the world in many ways, from word on the street to billboards in times square. Everything has an influence, for example Gabi Garbutt’s new EP The Creation of the birds was influenced by Mexican surrealist painter Remedios Varo. who has a painting with the same title.

Panic Gabu Garbutt Dy Blonde

Varo has explained that she ‘repeatedly turned to music as a symbol of the wholeness [she]sought whilst believing that surrealism “contributed to art in the same way psychoanalysis has contributed to the exploration of the subconscious.” Garbutt’s latest release does just this.

Her feature track Panic encapsulates the dismal state of current affairs in a wittily wrapped opener that hits you like the cold stepping out of the shower.  This track brings with it a barnstorming collab from Du Blonde for an anthemic feel.  Whilst the second track, Stun like a flower truly explores the boundaries of surrealism, the dreamscape of a shaken mind, the art revolution of the human experience, if we do not strip back the layers of ourselves how we expect to understand our surface? Entrenched in gothic pessimism, shrouded in a foreboding atmosphere this track tis imbued in the macabre wrapped in a harrowing , power ballad style.

Swim in the unconscious sea of your mind, watch the waves roll over you as your skin stays dry, your hands become those on a clock face by the time we reach All The Magic’ which burns us deeper into the surrealistic wells of Gabi’s imagination, with arcane references to occult spells and alchemy, concluding with a spacey chromatic outro that rolls meticulously into Unquiet Mind. 

Just like the experimental elements of surrealism, everything means nothing and nothing means silence, this latest EP introduces a new direction, for Gabi. Goodbye to her distinctive jangly guitars hello to a more plaintive piano riff, a sip of sweet sax and what could either be a flute or a whistle or a soundbite of Garbutt’s mind. As the great Salvador Dali once said “Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.” The exploration into the unknown is a frightening but liberating journey.

The EP rounds off with Satellite Gazing, a pensive ballad about searching for solace in the night sky and finding only blinking satellites, the rattling space junk of some ‘raging tycoon’, presumably Elon Musk. One day we will find a can of pop on the moon, half empty and warmed by the sun. Bored of poisoning our own planet we must pullet space next, none of these missions will extend our time on Earth or on any planet in the solar system for that matter.

Fly from the monotonous horrors of your 9-5 with The Creation Of Birds’ which embraces us on a spellbound odyssey through the hinterlands of alchemy, dark magic, melancholy and finally to the stars. Remedios Varo would probably hum along to it as she paints.