PREMIERE | Alexis Castrogiovanni, "Someday My Thoughts Will Be Like a Range of Mountains"
Introducing Canada’s rising pop cellist visionary Alexis Castrogiovanni; photographed by Mariam Waliji.
The mind is a powerful creative instrument. Thoughts can be loud, rendering new fields of vast sweeping landscapes, imagining new horizons that span as far as the consciousness can muster the extents of nearly unlimited scopes of fields, hills, oceans, meadows, forests, artic tundra, infinite beaches to exotic tropics. These streams of imaginative thoughts grow, like the ways the unconscious paints entirely alternate realities from the latent tissues of scattered sparks of recollected miscellany gathered from all corners of the interior of our perceptive faculties. Our thoughts are never static or staid like a marsh or slough with water lily lagoons but rather are visceral paintings in constant motion like a trickling brook or the roaring waterways of river rapids and psychic streams of sentiment, dreams and unfulfilled wishes. Thoughts are always growing, going places, some within the realm of our control and others left to the chaos and free play of signs and signifiers acting and firing into being on their own accord. The most attuned and focused eye of the beholder can witness these inner events in real time, appreciating the force of vision and volition that exist from within us all that serve as the engine of motivated desires.
Tuning into these concepts and more is pop cellist Alexis Castrogiovanni who presents a listen to the ambitious and exquisite title track “Someday My Thoughts Will Be Like a Range of Mountains”. Accompanied by visuals directed by Millefiore Clarkes (from the National Film Board of Canada) alongside visual assists from Oakar Myint and Sam Petrie; Castrogiovanni’s classical meets contemporary dream boards are made manifest in rich dramatic overtures that embraces the places where the elements and arts intersect in a beloved, concerted harmony. Alexis entertains the potent powder kegs of poetics, channeling the energy of acoustic strings into the arenas of controlled electric dissonance that blends orchestral conceits into the visceral avenues of dive venues created like organic grottos made from the holistic and earthly materials of imagination unbound. “Someday” exhibits the manners in which the progressive fields of arts contribute to building new frontiers of limitless flights of fancy.
The energetic strings of Alexis Castrogiovanni move in unison like the accompanying visuals that traverse across dunes, coasts, forestall canopies, feelings, frequencies, fields, oceanic splendor and so forth. "Mountains" partakes in a sacred communion between the human spirit and nature, a place where wants and needs connect to the elements of earth in a prayer to the universe for growth, wisdom, driven by unlimited aspirations. Analogies, similes and metaphors spill out from the movements of rising and falling notes like the patterns of tides, winds that whistle through the soaring air of blowing breezes that swims through the congregations of reeds, to the rippling and rushing cycles of sea and stream. Alexis paints poems of the heart, spirit and mind with the mediums lent by the systems of the universe where orchestrations of exquisite grandeur are interwoven from the fabrics of elements that arrange and rearrange themselves according to the artist's own passionate design.
String bound symphonies styled by Alexis Castrogiovanni; photographed by Mariam Waliji.
Alexis Castrogiovanni provided some expansive reflections on the title track and the upcoming release:
This EP, Someday My Thoughts Will Be Like a Range of Mountains, was my first time making a studio recording. It felt like an alien world away from the classical music world in which I grew up, where we devoted our time and energy to the art of giving live stage performances. My training concentrated on things like the audience, the room and a high level of perfection that would translate into a polished live performance. Performing to a microphone in a studio was so new for me, recording, editing and mastering felt like utter mysteries before I worked on this EP.
My classical music training and language is present in everything I do, whether I’m honoring it or rebelling against it. I think in the title track and “To Catch a Feeling”, you can hear echoes of the many hours I have spent in the cello section in symphony orchestras over the years. There is a sense of expansiveness, textural possibility and sheer human power in an orchestra. I felt that when I was trying to carve and shape those two particular songs, they feel somehow orchestral to me. The deep, raw emotions I was so inspired by in classical music — like in Mahler or Britten— was what came to my mind when writing them, they called for that kind of setting, so that’s what I tried to give to them while still understanding my music as pop.
Mirroring realities, Alexis Castrogiovanni; photographed by Wellington Sanipe.
“Ex Girl” and “A Certain Point” are like emotional hair balls. It’s this way to cough up a pure, distilled feeling — like envy, or giddy new love. It is a different and equally strong part of my heart and mind that is much less measured and disciplined. It’s this freedom to just say it like I felt it in a moment and to allow myself to sink up to my eyeballs in a feeling and preserve it in amber, to turn it over in my hands many months and years later.
Visual language on the other hand is stunningly new for me. As a musician, I sometimes feel that I have lived my life largely through my ears. Millefiore Clarkes, the director of the music video for “Someday My Thoughts Will Be Like a Range of Mountains”, lives on Prince Edward Island on the east coast of Canada. Her work caught my attention because I felt that she understood landscape as a character, an entity as equally powerful and present as a human being. PEI is a unique island in the country and unique in the world. The colors and textures you see in the video are the exact colors and textures as they live in my memory. Filming as the sun came up on the beach in particular is an October morning I will never forget.
Through the reflective frames with Alexis Castrogiovanni; photographed by Alexis Glitch.
In a popular culture that is so profoundly American-centric, it feels important to me that I stand tall in my identity as a Canadian singer and songwriter. I feel connected to Canadian singer-songwriters and writers that came before me and the grounded way they stand in their own Canadian language and imagery as they have experienced this country. It felt important to me that the Canadian landscape was a part of the music video. I feel the weight of this moment in history and our relationship with nature and I see Canada as a country of unique natural beauty on planet earth. I feel similarly in the language I use in my songs. In “To Catch a Feeling”, I sing about a moose. My only memory of seeing one is as a teenager in Algonquin Park in Ontario and it floored me. That memory is embedded into the song, it felt ancient, out of time, and connected to this specific place in the world. In “A Certain Point” I wrote the chorus to repeat green and white and blue — and this is also my Canada: speeding past your window on a clear summer day, the green of the trees, deciduous or coniferous, mixing with the white of the clouds, and the blue of the sky.
For the title track “Someday My Thoughts Will Be Like a Range of Mountains”, I want to tip my hat to Colin Stetson. If anyone can play the natural world with his instrument, if any instrumentalist channels that same immense human power you feel from an orchestra, it’s him. I saw his live performance in December 2019 at a small Montreal venue. I stood to the side of the stage with a few other people, all of us pressed to the wall. I was gobsmacked. After that show, I understood a new way of writing and speaking on my instrument and I wrote this song. The lyrics are a time capsule, they are a yearning feeling, trying to understand longings and hunger that won’t let you go, grasping at straws hoping something will save you from this wandering, lost feeling. I don’t know if there’s a resolution or an answer in the music, but the questions felt strong enough to go on.
Alexis Castrogiovanni’s EP Someday My Thoughts Will Be Like a Range of Mountains arrives September 21.
