Maple Glider is the solo project of Melbourne-based artist Tori Zietsch. Last week, she released her debut album To Enjoy is the Only Thing, a beautiful, captivating collection of poetry that is as unpredictable as it is meditative. The songs “relate to working through her experience as a child raised in religion, and the years she spent trying to extract that from her identity.” However, “many are also about love and relationships” – more specifically, “the end of, middle of, confusion of.”
“Swimming” is one of those tracks that you wish you could go back in time and hear for the first time again; there’s a potent aura of mysticism that emanates like the perfumed smoke from a put out candle, marking either the beginning or end of a perpetual cycle. There’s barbed feelings of hesitation and uncertainty within all the soft, feathered timbre; the lilt on the last millisecond of the word “swim” in the chorus sways in perpetual limbo, never quite settling in the gut. Ultimately, it leaves one in an intoxicating haze of unintelligible, abstract emotions and images, but in a way that brings euphoria (albeit an ambered, somber euphoria – wait, is that melancholy?) rather than confusion. Zietsch used similar language in her explanation of the album as a whole:
This is what the album looks like to me: Walking past tinsel covered trees in mid-September, swimming along the calanques in the south of France, car-bonnet frost, darkness at 4pm, lightness until 10pm, a muted feeling, the perpetual grey fog that swallows the Silver Coast, the colour red, this ugly green dress, red wine, red blood, red lips, red is the colour of the cardinal’s robe, Switzerland, my mother’s diaries, a coroner’s report, the sun on my face, the end of love.
To Enjoy is the Only Thing is out now.
P
photo by Bridgette Winten
kid with a vinyl 