"Matriarch" by Hiatus

This track, "Matriarch by Hiatus (the nom de musique of British musician/producer Cyrus Shahrad) is pensive and touching...he explains below:

"That’s my grandmother laughing in the breakdown. She passed a few years ago at an age well over 100 – no one is sure of the exact number, but she lived through wars and revolutions, saw kings crowned and dethroned, societies rise and fall. Towards the end of her life all she seemed to do was laugh, like she’d finally gotten the joke at the centre of existence. Originally this video was intercut with footage of her laughing, which was supposed to say something about female power in a world run to ruin by self-appointed tough guys. At the last minute I decided I couldn’t use those clips without her permission, so now it’s just a bunch of men beating each other up, which she’d probably have found hilarious. She loved these films anyway. She was the best."

https://www.instagram.com/cyrushiatus

"We Can Be Ghosts Now" by Hiatus

"Meet me in the dust cloud... Meet me in the white light."
By Hiatus featuring Shura.

The video is lovely but the song has really snuck up on me... shimmering, tender, bittersweet, powerful. The golden, glittering combination of the chimes and mandolin as a backdrop for Shura's murmurings is just...just...oh... *swoon.*

I just can't let this song go. It is moving me to my core, and after finding out more about it, I can finally feel why. The artist Hiatus, whose real name is Cyrus Shahrad, wrote the lyrics with the tragedy of 9/11 in mind.

“I’ve been returning to the subject of September 11th in my writing and my music since the event itself,” he says. “Trying to artistically represent the scale of that day’s destruction is futile given the wealth of documentary footage, which is too powerful to allow for creative interpretation. But I do think there’s a place for exploring the human stories that unfolded in the dust cloud, especially those guided by love on a day remembered largely as an act of overwhelming hate.”

Vocalist Shura remarks, “I remember when Cyrus first played me the 20-second loop that eventually became the track,” she says. “Even then I was haunted by this hypnotic beat and the sense of something altogether more mournful at its core. It’s a song as sparse as it is rich, and the imagery of those two former lovers, now leading separate lives, finding each other again amid the chaos and collapse of everything they once knew… that’s something I find irrevocably moving.”

The lines "Meet me in the dust cloud" and "Meet me in the white light" are all the more shattering with this knowledge. Stunningly powerful and moving.

Wow.


Bury everything you own
On a hill in Peckham Rye
Say a prayer for those you’ve known
As trace of fire scars the sky

A heaven of abandoned stars
River running black and red
Fight your way through crowds and cars
As rockets flower overhead

Meet me in the dust cloud
As The Towers tumble all around
We can be ghosts now
We don’t ever have to make a sound

Meet me in the white light
As the city slowly lifts away
We can be a ghost now
With the memory of another day

Meet me in the white light,
in the white light now…


http://soundcloud.com/hiatus
https://www.facebook.com/hiatusmusic