SRSQ (pronounced seer-skew) is the solo project of Kennedy Ashlyn. She’s unveiled the lead single from her debut album, Unreality, titled “The Martyr” (listen below). Kennedy explains the song is “about being repeatedly pummeled by menaces of your own design. It’s about desperation and exhaustion and the hesitant resignation to these cyclical patterns. It functions as the initial ground on which the rest of Unreality is paved as it twists into much darker territory.” Read more here.
Creative voids aren’t filled, but rather holes left that push the edges of the present into new realms of consciousness. SRSQ’s pulse began after the death of Kennedy’s closest friend and Them Are Us Too collaborator Cash Askew, a casualty in the sudden and tragic Oakland Ghost Ship Fire of 2016. Driven by loss, SRSQ became the vehicle for Kennedy’s transformative process, exploring nuance, nostalgia, reflection, and reconciliation, manifesting in the aural landscape of Unreality.
Unreality is an entrance into a new form of storytelling, traversing the present while pulling from a deep swath of experience, immersion and sound. Like the impulse it pulls from, each song evokes the complex duality of meditation-where simple intersects with infinite.
Ambient synthesizers that approach harshness, relentless arpeggiations act together with Kennedy’s vocals as a lush weapon, weaving cloud-like fables over orchestration that’s familiar and foreign. Trance-like at times, yet always rooted in cadence and structure, the synesthesia of sound and feeling takes cues from the delicate miasma of Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine or Dead Can Dance, using their example as the ground floor for building a new temple of frequency. Kennedy proves an adept architect of rhythm, using sequenced electronics as a deep backbeat that allows the harrowing beauty of her vocals to lead the journey.
Produced by Matia Simovich of Inhalt, Unreality is simultaneously crisp and full, each tone and note occupying its own unique sonic world – grief butted against power, tracked to a heavy heartbeat. Unreality will be released October 26 on Dais Records. For more info and pre-orders please visit here.
Top photo by Kristin Cofer
