Friends-in-arms reveling at the intersection of classical virtuosity, existential poetics, and art-film surrealism, Seattle art-pop duo Glass Heart String Choir weaves golden lyrical threads of haute-art into their achingly beautiful orchestral tapestry.

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Their latest single and video, Wounds, is a delicate folk-pop offering reminiscent of Sufjan Stevens and My Brightest Diamond. Set within the alluring visuals of Joshua Tree and the Coachella Valley, the video finds the duo’s violinist/composer Katie Mosehauer fighting to escape the cyclic burden of psychic wounds and emotional scars.

 

Directed by Katie, the video finds her attempting to escape the confines of memory, artfully moving through unforgiving landscapes, endlessly looped back to a pool that should be a reprieve from the heat, but is instead a beguiling entrapment. Katie explains, “There are so many emotional spaces that we occupy alone, carrying a burden of psychic wounds and emotional scars that we never speak of to anyone. Music is an important place to give names to those spaces and make them visible to everyone. Wounds creates a world in which anyone who has or is sitting with those lonely emotions will have a friend sitting with them to celebrate the escape, to mourn the setbacks, and to offer a 2’30” reprieve to share that space with someone who understands.”

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Their previous 2021 release, California, is a lyrical tug-of-war between fond recollection, consolation, and sorrow, with vocalist Ian Williams’ sanguine delivery floating upon Mosehauer’s elegant violin melodies and choral soundscapes suggestive of contemporary soundtrack composers Yann Tiersen and Jocelyn Pook. The 100+ string-sections and near-operatic highs of their Light EP are replaced with an airy, Enya-esque choir that haunts the piano-driven bridge, and boldly carries the song forward in its latter half, bringing a soft new dimension to the traditional repertoire.

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The California video finds Glass Heart String Choir unraveling the complexities of memories and dreams, where the borders of the real world and the mythical one of our recollections are intertwined, slipping between remembrance and history. Filmed with specialty lenses that accentuate light and refract and reflect the edges of our visual field, the video serves as a metaphor for myth, hallucination, mirage; a cognate of the heart  imagined, speculated, remembered, both in stunning detail and hazy, alluring beauty.