Light Widening "Apocalypse of the Small Self" Digital Download (PRE-ORDER)

Digital Download

Apocalypse of the Small Self by contrast is a powerful chamber folk record, with a haunted house quality emanating from each song. It's a lyrical journey through the protagonists' alchemical transformation. Consisting of musings about modernity, the death and birth cycle, and the quicksand of escaping religious delusions only to find yourself in the realms of bleak scientific rationalism. Possibly most comforting is the non-falsifiable absurdism of magical thinking which fills the void left by the death of God. At points these are poetic retellings of a humdrum daily life, with its weather changes and dream logic wanderings becoming a depressive labyrinth of coping mechanisms, all in attempt to discover the true self. While thankfully acknowledging the stabilizing roles friendship and finding new love can play in the process.

For this record, Owen and Braden Nelson divided the labor evenly. Owen wrote all of the lyrics and guitar parts over the course of the last decade. Trying to emphasize a first-said-best-said stream of consciousness style when writing, usually with few changes made afterwards. Immediacy was deeply important to this record. Owen and Braden whittled down the songs on this album from a much larger collection of these songwriting experiments, then Braden was able to come in and flesh out the songs both as a producer and multi-instrumentalist.

 "Creativity works the best within bounds." Owen says, and Light Widening took that to heart with Apocalypse of the Small Self. The main guitar and vocals of all twelve songs were recorded live without a metronome in a two day period at Colin Knight's Paradise Records in Orange County, California. Then embellished by Braden's melody mirroring piano, tasteful electric guitar and bass playing, and ultimately glued together by Brad Muus's accordion."