Sarah Swillum - "Crush Island"

To be adrift and lost is to be in the possession of a certain kind of freedom. And with freedom of any kind hard to come by in this the year of our abandonment, glimpses of freedom are not something to be taken lightly. Sarah Swillum is a person who lives in Athens, Georgia, and I hear freedom in every note of their music. Sarah Swillum is looking at our minds, and listening to our conversations, and they are not sure about what they're seeing and hearing. How could they be? Who of us truly even understands ourselves? One can both be amused by the carnival and simultaneously horrified. This is music rooted in a whimsy that is deadly fucking serious.Sarah Swillum understands what it means to be alive as we barrel through this century, which is to say that Sarah Swillum understands that all of us are dying.




Note: The name of this artist may also be JIMJIM. That's how they're being billed at a festival this weekend. The confusion, the identity-flux, only makes this music feel more right to me, more right of this moment as a thing. Go to their bandcamp and shower them with dollars. We spend so much time throwing money at problems, why not try throwing them at a solution? Here's one more if you need convincing.