Just a few years ago, Kennedy Ashlyn was one half of the up-and-coming goth pop act Them Are Us Too, a group formed when both members were students at UCSC. The duo began touring on summer vacations, and before long had signed with influential goth and experimental label Dais Records. For such a young band, they were poised for success.
And then, tragedy.
On Dec. 2, 2016, the Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland took 36 young lives, nearly all of whom were local artists, musicians, organizers and activists. Among them was Them Are Us Too guitarist Cash Askew. The loss is difficult to convey in words. Unreality, the debut album by SRSQ (pronounced ‘Seer Skew’) is Ashlyn’s attempt convey this loss through music.
“Feel the rush of rupture/Feeling closer, closer,” Ashlyn sings on album highlight “Cherish,” a darkly luminous gem that evokes the golden age of British label 4AD’s gothier output (Cocteau Twins, Bauhaus, Dead Can Dance). “Prelude,” Unreality’s opening track, consists of little more than Ashlyn’s voice and an ominous procession of bells, conveying the tone of the album to come: mournful, searching and shrouded in mist.
“It’s a really eerie and dark song,” Ashlyn says, adding that it was one she had written some years back and held onto. “The first verse is kind of like setting the scene, but I didn’t know where to go next. And then after Ghost Ship, it was just like…”
She makes a “plunk” sound, like a rock dropping into a lake.
Unreality is an album haunted by loss, prefigured by tragedy. But in the exploration of her own internality, Ashlyn brings the listener to some beautiful places, as on the aforementioned “Cherish,” and lead single “The Martyr.” This, she attributes to music’s ability to evoke specific types of brooding, which, like a friend, can then match the listener’s internal state.
“I create spaces for feelings to exist,” Ashlyn says. “Music for me, and the music I make, makes this place that exists and doesn’t exist at the same time, where things that don’t make sense can exist in a more comfortable way.”
It is here, in this phantom space that the listener finds the heart of SRSQ’s sound: an alternate place conjured up from the depths of memory and longing for those who need it, its ethereal columns built on a bedrock of fog, looking out on the bank of unknown shores.
SRSQ
Nov 3, 8pm, $10
The Ritz, San Jose
