“The Old World” Mega Bog

Mega Bog, the art-pop project of multi-instrumentalist Erin Birgy, will release her new album Dolphine on June 28 via Paradise of Bachelors, and today she shares new single “For The Old World” alongside an incredible video directed by Laura Conway. The video features Birgy roaming the American West, and was inspired by the work of classic filmmakers Ingmar Bergman, Sergei Parajanov, David Lynch, and Michael Powell.

“When I was writing ‘For the Old World,'” “the song was kind of oozing out, sneering and murky, sort of like the feeling I sometimes get when I’ve spent so much time (sometimes years) on the quality/integrity/authenticity of a project, whether it’s a social/romantic/friendship or music/meaning/impressions-and then something really hits you in a devastating way, and you’re on this gnarly bender where you become deliberately evil to reflect the absurdity of the whole story. Like walking out of the shower, shaved and sudsed, the light is glowing, the thunderstorm is over, and you trip in a patch of poison ivy and watch your skin boil, torturing that idyllic splinter of peace.

The video takes some space from the song’s imagery, and experiments with stories that already exist, to play with our perspectives of the impressions they made, by mirroring the alien worlds in my literal backyard, sort of saying goodbye to these beautiful scenes and environments that have been so dangerous and healing. We tried to visually inspire the jumps from the old and new worlds that are a part of a dreaming human’s bubble of thought.”

In October of 2016, Erin took her dark sketches to the Outlier Inn studio in Woodridge, NY, with a passionate crew of deeply bonded musicians. Together, they arranged and executed these eleven dizzy pop songs, live, over a tight seven days. In addition to Birgy (vocals, guitar, piano), the lineup included Meg Duffy (guitar), Matt Bachmann (bass), Derek Baron (drums), James Krivchenia (engineering, percussion, effects), Aaron Otheim (synthesizers, piano), and Ash Rickli (guitar and vocals). Later, Will Murdoch (clarinet, synthesizers) and Zach Burba (synthesizers, bass) offered their own atmospheric overdubs from their home on the West Coast. Over the next year, Erin added to the tapestry with vocal contributions by Nick Hakim and Kalen Remy Walther , upright bass by Benjamin Murphy , textural guitar by Austin Jackson , and saxophone by Jeff Tobias , until she had successfully excavated each cold mystery with proper care and wonder. The completed sound is thick and inviting. Bellowing, breathless vocals, mystical lyrics with the presence of poetry and the intuitive logic of dreams, and promiscuous, sometimes dissonant chord structures swirl together, coalescing into hazy and hypnotic fantasies.

Advertisement

Looking for something new to listen to?

Sign up to our all-new newsletter for top-notch reviews, news, videos and playlists.