It would be very easy to say that this track is ambient and ethereal and leave it at that. However there is much more to the continual hypnotic hum of synth and wordless voices that call and cry throughout than a cleanse of the soul, or as background music for chillment—it is actually the opposite. Much like with his previous track 'silhouette', pastel creates this whirlwind of sound in 'stammer' that blocks and muffles the outside world, stuns and clears the mind, in order to set a very lonely scene. It is a vast landscape and there is nothing but the wind which is howling but muffled and there's you yourself standing in its midst as it whips up the sand. The colour is down so low it might as well be greyscale.
Talking about the track, pastel writes that it "deals most explicitly with an inability to formulate language around the historical and generational trauma tackled in the preceding tracks of the EP." This is a reference to his latest self-release as a whole, absent, just dust, a collection of music that illustrates loss as viewed from the perspective of Native Americans, himself coming from this background. Words fail, unable to form into something that can fully explain what has been done to the New World's original people since European colonisation: a very big, very old subject. So it's no wonder that the voice in 'stammer' literally stammers, stuttering fricatives of words truncated, struggling, the forgotten language of communities in the dust, in the ghostly wind, the traumatic growl of sub-bass
- π 'stammer' is the finale of pastel's absent, just dust EP, released at the end of last month, which you can grab from Bandcamp. Half the proceeds taken from its sales will be given to FreshestCollective.org, "who have provided continued legal support to water protectors since the founding of the Sacred Stone Camp."
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