Sephy is a new project from Joel Sephy Gleiser. His songs are born from mathematical, mantric jams at his piano (think John Adams or Keith Jarrett), Sephy is impressionistic, psychedelic, meditative pop music for thinking and dancing. With a unique approach to melodies, harmonies, rhythms, production, timbres, and lyrics, there is not a boundary the music fails to push. The lyrics also defy the conventional and are as much in the realm of the metaphysical as the political. Sephy explores the meaning and meaninglessness of life, love, family, words, time, and home—the known and the unknowable.
At the core of these themes is an exploration of home. Joel Sephy Gleiser is a descendant of immigrants who themselves were descendants of immigrants. His Colombian parents and Argentine grandparents felt ostracized and fearful for being Jews, just as his Polish, Romanian, and Lithuanian great-grandparents felt (rightfully) fearful. With lyrics in English, Spanish, and Spanglish, the listener is left to understand or fail to understand based on their own knowledge, and demonstrates the experience of otherness he has felt his whole life. It is from this perspective that he writes in his song Brujo Chueco:
“Si quieres, te lo cuento otra vez
Si quieres, te lo cuento en revés
Si tu ni sabes quien eres,
you don’t even know who you are.”
[If you want, I’ll tell it to you again
If you want, I’ll tell it to you in reverse
Since you don’t know who you are,
you don’t even know who you are]”
In today’s political climate, so many in the USA have (selectively?) forgotten their own ancestral histories of immigration—their own escapes from terror to opportunity. For Sephy, the ancestral memories and inherited traumas are impossible to ignore and are vital to understanding the world. In the song, Me Creo, Me Creè, Sephy elaborates on the theme of what is inherited and what can never be passed on:
“Nacimiento.
Crecimiento.
Si me creo, me creé solo.
[Birth.
Growth.
If I believe myself, I made myself.]
Mis ancestros me persiguen.
Y mis sobrinitas me llevan por la mano
[My ancestors chase me.
And my nieces take me by the hand.]
Ser el ser que conocistè,
tantas noches me dijiste
que tu amor es más que estos abrazos.
[To be the person who you knew,
so many nights you told me
that your love is more than these embraces.]”
With piercing vocals over top of virtuosic, geometric, and looping piano patterns like rhythmically twisted salsa montunos or Thelonious Monk, the song swirls and teeters on the edge of control and chaos fearlessly. Expanding on the psychedelic pop music of such geniuses as Björk, Animal Collective, Juana Molina, Radiohead, and Jorge Ben Jor, Sephy always seeks to break new ground and expand the possibilities of the art of sound.
