New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Montreal's Alexis Castrogiovanni's ambitious & emotional debut EP is streaming everywhere today. In case you missed the singles, be sure to check out Alexis' incredibly cinematic music video for "Someday My Thoughts Will Be Like a Range of Mountains." & "Ex-Girl."
Alexis Castrogiovanni's pared-down, emotional musical landscapes employ genres from classical and folk to trip-hop and punk. Trained as a cellist, a lifetime of conservatory training emboldened her to interweave the expected with the unexpected, the structural with the improvisatory, inhabiting the limbo between singer-songwriter and classical musician.
In her music, you can hear echoes of saxophonist Colin Stetson, with her voice and writing sitting in comfortable companionship with singer-songwriters like
Regina Spektor, Tori Amos, and Mitski-other classically trained musicians who dare to subvert genre. Someday My Thoughts Will Be Like a Range of Mountains is an EP reflecting on the four years of musical exploration that followed the end of Alexis' formal classical training.
In this time, Alexis taught herself songwriting, nurturing a long-held love of poetry that had few outlets in her cello studies. Her lyrics are part poetry, part self-philosophy, as she gives a window into her searches for meaning, and slowly learning to love.
As her debut EP, Someday My Thoughts Will Be Like a Range of Mountains features some of the industry's premier audio talents: Polaris Prize winner Jon Kaspy (Jeremy Dutcher) as recording engineer, with mixing by Grammy winner Mark Lawson, and Mastering by Harris Newman (Wolf Parade, A
Silver Mt. Zion). The music video for the title track, Someday My Thoughts Will Be Like a Range of Mountains, was directed by Millefiore Clarkes (National Film Board of Canada).
Alexis gave some words on her debut: "The inspiration behind these four tracks are sort of split down the centre- on one side are "Ex-Girl" and "A Certain Point'," which are like emotional hairballs; this way to cough up a pure, distilled feeling such as envy, insecurity, or a giddy new love. On the other side are "Someday My Thoughts Will Be Like a Range of Mountains'' and "To
Catch A Feeling," which called for an expansive, blown-wide-open kind of setting, so that's what I tried to give to them.
With all of these songs, I started with a feeling, and with an honest hand I tried to lay it out on the page. Sometimes the truth in my heart changes hour by hour, but giving those truths and emotions a musical setting like a gem in gold allows me to walk slowly through my heart, chamber by chamber, room by room. In Italian, stanza means "room." I hope the underlying message is heard- 'you can bring your whole self, don't hide the uncertainty, strangeness or darkness. Bring your questions and anger and sorrow to the party, wear your own face to the table, just come.'"
