Cz.K. Sebő’s new capsule boy song, “North Maine Woods,” came out just a few hours ago. (capsule boy is his electronic project.) This dreamy, veiled piece is (in part) a love song to the place in Maine where he worked one summer, years ago, and where he has never returned. The immediate feeling is recognizable: a place that you love and can never return to, because even if you do go back there one day, it will be different and so will you. A loss that can’t be taken away. But also a sense of being there forever, always carrying it. Both of these at the same time.
But then what the song does with this is so gentle and subtle that even the idea seems like a passageway into something else. I love the part in the middle where the keyboards sound like trees on fire. And the part where everything pares down, then slowly builds up, rises up again. The sound has many different textures wrapping and unwrapping slowly. Individual notes take me by surprise. It evokes some sort of memory or else creates it from scratch, sending me on a search.
It evokes other music too—I can’t figure out what. Maybe Brendan Perry’s 1999 solo album Eye of the Hunter, for instance, the song “Death Will Be My Bride.” Perry’s sound is different, though: more upfront and pristine. I don’t think I’ll figure out what this reminds me of, since it’s an indirect likeness. For that matter, it might be reminding me of itself, since I have heard it a couple times at concerts. This can happen with a song I love: it seems to bring up another song, but that other song is like the woods in Maine, lost but present.
I don’t know whether this or “Funeral Circular” is my favorite capsule boy song so far. Let them both be, in different ways.
Congratulations to Cz.K. Sebő for this song and to Fruzsina Balogh for the cover art.
Take Away the Takeaway 