We’re always excited when we come across an artist pursuing their own unique artistic path. It’s certainly no easy feat: in an industry landscape that often rewards uniformity and familiarity, Black Leather Birds rebels with a wave of experimental electronica and mangled spoken words, an aural formula that’s hypnotic, brooding, and certainly peculiar and very personal. ‘of Children and Their Sorceries’ is the perfect evidence of that, an EP that fully embraces the unconventional and the eclectic.
Known by day as Chicago-based producer, composer, and technologist A.G. Syjuco (also a pivotal member of Jack of None), Black Leather Birds compiles a tracklist that’s quite varied, but that also shares intensity and gloominess as its primary qualities. You see, ‘of Children and Their Sorceries’ will take listeners from the trip-hop-laden and electro-rock territories of ‘Nothing Ever Grows Here’ to ‘Monster’, a seemingly neoclassical spoken word composition that eventually resolves into a quirky, trembling outro.
Listeners will also be puzzled and confused at times, and we reckon that’s the intended outcome, at least partly. The overall mood is urgent and dark-leaning, a feature that matches the EP’s overarching lyrical ethos, here focused on mental health and existentialism. As we are told: “Themes of anxiety and existential dread run throughout, handled with a literary sensibility that places spoken word, prose poetry, and ritual chant alongside more conventional song structures.”
Recommended! Discover ‘of Children and Their Sorceries’ now: