Though truly no artist should be the victim of our journalistic laziness, some are simply more resistant to comparison or definition. Such is the case with Atlanta’s Orchid Mantis. The young sonic architect is a post-modernist if ever there was one, building his auditory aesthetic upon the foundations of ambient organics and subtlety in his bold and righteous experimentation. Gentle guitar chords in playful balance with even gentler vocals find themselves masked behind the rain of No Moon’s muffling production. That composition eventually finds its own space in the balance of it all, fading in and out with energy and its own welcoming chords, leaving the finished track a fluid, dynamic display of Orchid Mantis’s indefinability.

 

"The spatial setting of No Moon, its organic instrumentation, and the abstract imagery of its lyrics were all constructed from the ground-up to evoke a reflective state – something to listen to in the woods, alone at night."– Thomas Howard (Orchid Mantis)

 

No Moon is an intriguing, mysterious, yet lovable track that reaches hidden depths with each subsequent listen. And thankfully for us all, it’s only the second single en route to Orchid Mantis’s forthcoming November album, Yellow House.

 

“Yellow House picks up where my previous project left off in the ongoing construction of my own personal mythology- symbology derived from the most meaningful and transformative forces in my life. Last year, an emblem of mychildhood, my grandparent’s yellow house in Sweden, was sold and repainted, forever altered. As if predestined, thatsame year my friends and significant other rented out a new yellow house - in physical terms, this is where I spent thelast year writing and recording this album (and parts of the last), but in a larger sense, the yellow houses representthe synchronous, cyclical patterns the trajectories of our lives seem to adhere to: nothing is ever truly here, andnothing is ever truly gone – leaving and returning, reoccurring.”