Life is a mystery. We arrive on this material plane by way of happenstance, left to figure it all out for ourselves in communion with fellow loved ones, family, friends, acquaintances. We grow, we learn, we laugh, we cry, we love, we lose, we try and try again in a trajectory that parallels the books, allegories and parables postulated by all that have arrived before us. The rise and fall of various historical trajectories move like the ebb and flow of the tides that connect sea to land as we explore a universe of wonders in hand with a trusted partner to share in the experience of the unknown together.

Having graced our pages with their album Kiku and recent single “Underneath the Universe”— The Parlor present a first listen to their mighty new record You Are Love and I Am You, accompanied by the lyric visualizer for “The Cloud Of Unknowing”. The duo of Jen and Eric Krans feature their most stunning release to date. A towering testament of living through the supernova brightness of blaring, burning lights to the outlying spaces of solar deprivation rife with perpetual night.

You Are Love and I Am You is the ultimate abandon to the proverbial Steve Winwood penned "Higher Love". The record is all about a fusion of hearts that transcend beyond the mapped scope of our galaxies, delivered with the theatrical orchestral splendor of immediacy on "Now" that raises the curtain on the big show-stopping tune, "The Cloud of Unknowing". The song is designed for the festival stage, a fervent anthem of ascending toward an enlightened echelon in the new sacred spaces of the sublime that defy semantic articulation. Jen taps into the holy books of Saint Stevie Nicks on the glorious “Oceans (Carry On)”, traversing into the bouncy rocks & boulder beats of "Serpentine", careening along the catchy and glitchy cool cuts of "Ouroboros Loop". Mantras move upward on the hypnotic "Restless Life", the doe eyed devotional "My Only Ever Lady" that makes the multiverse feel like a warmer place of infinite love.

"Remember How" rolls up all the 90s and 80s underground suave psych heroes into a heady hybrid strain, as "Letting Go Of That Too" is a candid lo-fi vignette about the art of letting go, as "Ecstacy You" swims into the serotonin soaked infinity pool of sensationalism. Love languages strum sweetly on "Love Tongue" that sends forth ripples and echoes of affection as "Underneath the Universe" discovers the undercurrents of ecstatic infinity, leaving us with the skip and trip rhythms of "Truth Loops" that concludes one of the year's big standout releases. The Parlor present a message of love, the universes and galaxies they inhabit and their unlimited power to take us toward the furthest reaches that far extend our own humbled and human courses of comprehension.

Eric and Jen of The Parlor penned a thoughtful meditation on "The Cloud of Unknowing" out May 19 with the full album You Are Love And I Am You

“The Cloud of Unknowing” is about the ecstasy of catharsis, named after a 14th century mystical treatise by an anonymous author that outlines contemplative meditation methods for Christians. Apparently it was dangerous to write such things. The song itself is about the space of meditation. The fullness of that universal emptiness. The freedom that comes from letting go of a need for certainty and identity. The openness of the space beyond words and concepts. The nonsymbolic. Socrates advocated unknowing. The Buddha too. And Chuang Tzu.

So many philosophers point toward unseeing as a means to escape the patterns that torment us. We found such freedom once, from our previous mode of existence, and it felt joyful and exciting, so we wrote this song about it. And if we could explain this better we would, but somehow, and this is going to sound crazy, but somehow in that space of unknowing one gets the sense that everything is animated by love. Everything that exists is love. You are love. I am love. You are a manifestation of the universe and so am I. We are made out of the same stuff. We may be unique but we are the same. We are made of the same particles. We came together by the same process. We are beings. Formed by love in love as love. Somehow this made sense intuitively to us so we wrote a song about it.

But it feels like a dream now. A very real dream like when you're dreaming and you try to open your mouth to say something and the words don't form at all, you just groan desperately. But we think that's why so many artists become obsessed with beauty and dreams. It's easier to show it than it is to say it. The songs show it in sound. It emulates the space of unknowing and the excitement of the experience, and the guttural punch of the realization of truth. And the fleetingness. The feather soft disappearance of bliss as it fades off into the noise of the world around us. Realization feels like it grips you with such immediacy and then the next moment arises and we're left wondering how we could ever tell a soul about what we just so vividly knew....we are left to continue forward in unknowing.

The Parlor’s You Are Love And I Am You will be available May 19.

Release show May 20 2pm-7:30pm, FREE, all ages at the Indian Ladder Cidery & Brewery Upper Biergarten.