SRSQ (Kennedy Ashlyn) is set to release her debut album, Unreality. SRSQ’s pulse began after the death of Kennedy’s closest friend and Them Are Us Too collaborator Cash Askew, a casualty in the sudden and tragic Oakland Ghost Ship Fire of 2016. Driven by grief and loss, SRSQ became the vehicle for Kennedy’s transformative process, exploring nuance, nostalgia, reflection, and reconciliation, manifesting in the aural landscape of Unreality.
SRSQ (pronounced seer-skew) is an entrance into a new form of storytelling, traversing the present while pulling from a deep swath of experience, immersion and sound. Like the impulse it pulls from, each song evokes the complex duality of meditation-where simple intersects with infinite.
Ambient synthesizers that approach harshness, relentless arpeggiations act together with Kennedy’s vocals as a lush weapon, weaving cloud-like fables over orchestration that’s familiar and foreign. Trance-like at times, yet always rooted in cadence and structure, the synesthesia of sound and feeling takes cues from the delicate miasma of Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, Fever Ray or Dead Can Dance, using their example as the ground floor for building a new temple of frequency. Kennedy proves an adept architect of rhythm, using sequenced electronics as a deep backbeat that allows the harrowing beauty of her vocals to lead the journey.
Produced by Matia Simovich of Inhalt, Unreality is simultaneously crisp and full, each tone and note occupying its own unique sonic world – grief butted against power, tracked to a heavy heartbeat. Unreality sees its release October 26 on Dais Records. For more info and pre-orders please visit here. This November, SRSQ journeys down the west coast performing new material. Highlights include Oakland, Seattle, LA’s Cloak & Dagger festival and more. See below for a full list of dates.
09.29: Dallas, TX – Amoury DE
11.02: San Diego, CA – The Whistle Stop
11.03: San Jose, CA – Ritz #
11.04: Oakland – Elbo Room Jack London
11.06: Portland, OR – Lovecraft #
11.07: Seattle, WA – Timbre Room #
11.10: Los Angeles, CA – Cloak & Dagger at State Theatre
# – w/ Houses of Heaven