Berlin-based songwriter Gemma Ray is ready to release her landscape driven album Psychogeology on February 15th, 2019 via Bronzerat. Our surroundings are not things outside of us. They shape our minds as we move through them. That connection is precisely what this album is about.
Like the poetry of Mary Oliver, Ray asks us to see ourselves as part of the sky, the birds, the rivers and the ground through her words and southwestern style strumming. An atmosphere of movement and travel is built on this album through a blending of a soundscape, mindscape, and landscape in unity.
We’re often fighting nature, not seeing the land for what it is, changing it to suit our needs, instead of accepting it as a part of us, as something within us that makes us who we are; simultaneously important and insignificant. Ray offers her thoughts about the album stating that it is “an ode to the majesty of landscape, the enormity of nature and time, and the inevitability of every human life eventually forming a minuscule part of further landscapes.”
Gemma Ray – Psychogeology
The first track, Blossom Crawls, sounds like a lullaby with a bass-driven groove and a voice that calls out to Stevie Nicks. In the title track Ray sings “ I keep looking for a landslide”, perhaps to find a way to halt inner and outer turmoil. In Roll on River, she laments “roll on river/ go roll away/ nothing is forever. People and rivers both change over time. You can come back to a river but it will never be the same water you saw the first time.
Psychogeology is a beautiful reminder of how the world is in us, and that some landscapes will always remind us that we’re still wildlife, here to live and die in harmony with everything else.
