Restless Mosaic - Quality Mirrors
West Coast artist Restless Mosaic presents 'Circling the Canopies', a haunting and hypnotic track, inspired by electronic music legends Delerium. This is the second single from his third album 'Quality Mirrors', due out on March 7.
Restless Mosaic is the project of Brandon Isleib, an electronic songmaker based in Everett, WA, named for the idea of a mosaic's intricacy and structure, and how the parts and the whole relate in a way that they only make sense when they come together. Combining sounds and genres, usually considered disparate, he connects them into something greater than any one of them.
"I wrote this song about my friend Mengju, out of our shared appreciation for the Neurodisc Records/Delerium sound and bass-heavy electronic music. I voice her as a wind elemental pollinating conifers, because the abundance of pollen and how it lands in that process is like how her brain works," says Brandon Isleib.
"The intro's pitch bends of both the pad and the bass line represent pollen falling from the wind onto the trees. I tried to bake an authentic Delerium homage, but I added too much bass. So it came out of the oven as 40%-speed atmospheric D'n'B - which is also tasty."
He earlier shared 'Lost Within This Time', featuring elevator samples and ethereal vocals by Anji Bee of iconic dreampop duo Lovespirals. In the video, Anji (a ghost haunting an elevator) lures Isleib into her haunted elevator. Now entrapped, she commits his soul to the poster, taking her place.
"'Lost Within This Time' is about my mental state post-pandemic. Like many, I’m finding it hard to re-acclimate. Places I used to go have closed. I quit doing the things I used to do. Many people I thought I knew either disappeared or showed sides that made me pull away. Society both on and offline seems much more hostile, and as a consequence I’ve become guarded," says Anji Bee.
The 'Quality Mirrors' album also features New York singer-songwriter Rose Alaimo and prolific rapper Declaime (Aloe Blacc, Madlib, and Flying Lotus), with whom Restless Mosaic is near to completing a new album that brings Declaime's poetry to Isleib's back catalog of instrumentals.
Through its song structures, transitions and balanced textures, and by anchoring certain aspects, the music on this album is grounded - sonic adventures exploring a sense of restlessness. A setting in which listeners can expect the unexpected, this music is a boon for your neuroplasticity. Restless Mosaic's music has been streamed over 3 million times via YouTube.
'Circling The Canopies' is out now exclusively via Bandcamp, while 'Lost Within This Time' is available everywhere, including Apple Music, Spotify and Bandcamp. The full 'Quality Mirrors' album will be released on March 7.
