"Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on a map at all," Irish writer Hugo Hamilton suggested in his 2003 memoir The Speckled People. On Warm Terracotta, Edwin Raphael takes this premise and meditates on it, leading us on an inner journey saturated with shades of psychedelic folk, chamber pop, ambient and Neo-soul with threads of classical Indian rāgas bathed in afternoon sun.
While world-building is an almost integral factor in making music to varying degrees, few take this to task as seriously as Raphael does. With its title alone, Warm Terracotta introduces a specific red-brown colour palette derived from badlands biomes. From there, it's a kaleidoscope that twists to reveal many more shades in the singer-songwriter's hands.
Raphael grew up studying classical guitar in Dubai, within a culture that embodied an irreconcilable sense of "placelessness" — a being from elsewhere — that never sat well with him. When he moved to Montreal at age 18 to study Marketing and Commerce at Concordia, he was finally able to feel rooted. And although he didn't end up pursuing the corporate career his parents (who'd immigrated from India's Kerala state) had envisioned, he found himself entrenched in the city's hotbed of indie bedroom pop makers, drawing on the intricate layers of Ben Howard and John Mayer soundscapes to create his own stratified, sedative sound.
Much like the references to drinking tea that populate multiple song titles on the album, Warm Terracotta serves as a tonic; a ritual, a grounding practice. The alt-folk mosaic exudes calm from its ambient-leaning intro "Desire Paths~" onwards, while Raphael tries to quell his own anxiety about his vices ("Tripping Through My Blood"), flaws ("Hate It When You See Me Like This!"), time ("Under Weather") and the like.
Many of these songs begin with a question or the word "and," to signify that something preceded their creation. Raphael often meets us in the middle of a thought with fragmented non-sequiturs that the lush instrumentation helps elevate into piecemeal poetic prompts. "Your girlfriends dressed like museum artifacts," he observes just before the descending melodic figure of "Contours of Spring" blooms with a spirited drumbeat, painting an image that's instantly evocative and rife with variables. Never overwrought, his concise turns of phrase — "It's all so bare, could be speaking in code," as he puts it amid the skipping psychedelic swirls on "Have You Been Told?" — ring out like intentions that you can repeat internally, testing how it feels to believe them.
Most words and concepts lack perfect direct translations from one language to another. Western and Eastern music — and all the obvious variants within those vast umbrellas — are no exception, and I can't pretend to be well-versed in the latter. I admittedly struggle to articulate the specifies of the way Warm Terracotta bridges the musical language gap, so to speak, or the way a relatively standard lineup of guitars, bass and drums is able to sound so nimbly pliable and ever-evolving in the hands of Raphael and his collaborators, including Fox Graham, Collin Steinz, Joao Gonzalez, Dhruv Visvanath and Chris Minielly.
Sometimes I like to look up terms, just to get a sense of a very basic linguistic topography of something, and I was immediately struck by the Arabic word maqām, which designates a pseudo-parallel to a melodic mode (or scale) in Western music and its simple definition: "place, location or position." It lends itself twofold to the ethos of Warm Terracotta, where that positionality — in a key, on a fretboard, or as a self to claim — is both what Raphael is seeking and also how he seeks it; the source of his identity struggle and the answer all in one.
This comes to a head on standout track "Homesick for the Place I Don't Even Know," which features vocals from Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Sam Valdez, whose own music is a fitting mishmash of shoegaze and vintage Americana. Although it probably hits the fastest tempo mark on the record, the living organism of "Homesick" stands as summary of the way Warm Terracotta moves as a whole, careening between a slow, acoustic beginning to its spectral middle interlude before Raphael leads it into a pulsating indie pop heart-racer by asking, "Could my mind go somewhere better now?" It comes in and out of the tranquility most of the album tries to harness, restlessly threatening to grow wings beyond the rich inner-life and move into real-world action, much like the way the artist extends a hand to the listener in pointing out these celestial observations.
More than just a collection of songs, Warm Terracotta is evidently meant to be an immersive, experiential album that rewards repeated listens and living with it. "It's all about like, finding that perfect loop that you want to live inside," Raphael told Montreal Rocks last year, now singing, "It's likely tie-dyed, made for stories / Loop it for me, loop it for me" on "Purple Inside." As these commingling reflections from the singer-songwriter bleed together, a vision of utopian fantasy — or, at the very least, a safe space to return to within oneself — emerges from the ruddy, unshaped clay, patterned with fingerprints that are unmistakably yours.
(Dine Alone)While world-building is an almost integral factor in making music to varying degrees, few take this to task as seriously as Raphael does. With its title alone, Warm Terracotta introduces a specific red-brown colour palette derived from badlands biomes. From there, it's a kaleidoscope that twists to reveal many more shades in the singer-songwriter's hands.
Raphael grew up studying classical guitar in Dubai, within a culture that embodied an irreconcilable sense of "placelessness" — a being from elsewhere — that never sat well with him. When he moved to Montreal at age 18 to study Marketing and Commerce at Concordia, he was finally able to feel rooted. And although he didn't end up pursuing the corporate career his parents (who'd immigrated from India's Kerala state) had envisioned, he found himself entrenched in the city's hotbed of indie bedroom pop makers, drawing on the intricate layers of Ben Howard and John Mayer soundscapes to create his own stratified, sedative sound.
Much like the references to drinking tea that populate multiple song titles on the album, Warm Terracotta serves as a tonic; a ritual, a grounding practice. The alt-folk mosaic exudes calm from its ambient-leaning intro "Desire Paths~" onwards, while Raphael tries to quell his own anxiety about his vices ("Tripping Through My Blood"), flaws ("Hate It When You See Me Like This!"), time ("Under Weather") and the like.
Many of these songs begin with a question or the word "and," to signify that something preceded their creation. Raphael often meets us in the middle of a thought with fragmented non-sequiturs that the lush instrumentation helps elevate into piecemeal poetic prompts. "Your girlfriends dressed like museum artifacts," he observes just before the descending melodic figure of "Contours of Spring" blooms with a spirited drumbeat, painting an image that's instantly evocative and rife with variables. Never overwrought, his concise turns of phrase — "It's all so bare, could be speaking in code," as he puts it amid the skipping psychedelic swirls on "Have You Been Told?" — ring out like intentions that you can repeat internally, testing how it feels to believe them.
Most words and concepts lack perfect direct translations from one language to another. Western and Eastern music — and all the obvious variants within those vast umbrellas — are no exception, and I can't pretend to be well-versed in the latter. I admittedly struggle to articulate the specifies of the way Warm Terracotta bridges the musical language gap, so to speak, or the way a relatively standard lineup of guitars, bass and drums is able to sound so nimbly pliable and ever-evolving in the hands of Raphael and his collaborators, including Fox Graham, Collin Steinz, Joao Gonzalez, Dhruv Visvanath and Chris Minielly.
Sometimes I like to look up terms, just to get a sense of a very basic linguistic topography of something, and I was immediately struck by the Arabic word maqām, which designates a pseudo-parallel to a melodic mode (or scale) in Western music and its simple definition: "place, location or position." It lends itself twofold to the ethos of Warm Terracotta, where that positionality — in a key, on a fretboard, or as a self to claim — is both what Raphael is seeking and also how he seeks it; the source of his identity struggle and the answer all in one.
This comes to a head on standout track "Homesick for the Place I Don't Even Know," which features vocals from Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Sam Valdez, whose own music is a fitting mishmash of shoegaze and vintage Americana. Although it probably hits the fastest tempo mark on the record, the living organism of "Homesick" stands as summary of the way Warm Terracotta moves as a whole, careening between a slow, acoustic beginning to its spectral middle interlude before Raphael leads it into a pulsating indie pop heart-racer by asking, "Could my mind go somewhere better now?" It comes in and out of the tranquility most of the album tries to harness, restlessly threatening to grow wings beyond the rich inner-life and move into real-world action, much like the way the artist extends a hand to the listener in pointing out these celestial observations.
More than just a collection of songs, Warm Terracotta is evidently meant to be an immersive, experiential album that rewards repeated listens and living with it. "It's all about like, finding that perfect loop that you want to live inside," Raphael told Montreal Rocks last year, now singing, "It's likely tie-dyed, made for stories / Loop it for me, loop it for me" on "Purple Inside." As these commingling reflections from the singer-songwriter bleed together, a vision of utopian fantasy — or, at the very least, a safe space to return to within oneself — emerges from the ruddy, unshaped clay, patterned with fingerprints that are unmistakably yours.
