Over five years since our last feature on MAR, the Providence based act is back to our pages with gloomy new offering, “Everything Is Alive”, written over three years of ecological disaster and psychological crisis. Coming as a personal expression of remorse, rage, catharsis, and renewal, to reduce ecological damage, the album will be released on digital only, with a limited edition booklet available, as well as a zine that delves deeper into the album’s themes.
Today, we look at some of its background and influences of this epic offering: writings, films, and albums which vocalist Kay Belardinelli to the band and inspired “Everything is Alive”:
– ecological distress and catastrophe
– deep ecology, eco-anarchism, and the interconnectedness of the living world
– impermanence, death, and rebirth
– rage and resistance
– chaos, desire, and the wildness within us
The “Everything is Alive” experience is cinematic, dramatic, and as Astral Noize has it, “conjures vast soundscapes of the imagination”. Despite its dark atmopsherics, MAR sounds as vital and inspired as ever. “Everything Is Alive” is beautiful, mysterious, scary, and thought-provoking.
Here are some of the publications that inpired it and serve as a great supplement to the lyrical content and the message behind “Everything is Alive”
Writings
- To Speak of Wildness by Kevin Tucker
- Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Short Films
- Tuyuku (dir. Nicolás Rojas Sánchez, 2021)
- Genius Loci (dir. Adrien Merigeau, 2021)
- Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary (dir. Sky Hopinka, 2017)
Feature Films
- Aluna (dir. Alan Ereira, 2012)
- Still the Water (dir. Naomi Kawase, 2014)
Music
- Backxwash – I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES
- Sophia Djebel Rose – Métempsycose
