The title refers to an esoteric concept that lies somewhere in the intersection of philosophy, astrology and paganism it’s obscurity is largely the point: ‘Your name is impossible to know / You’re like my four ethers / How the hell do you know the four ethers?’ In the accompanying music video, serpent is dressed in flowing red, orbited by hovering points of weird, golden light. The EP featured the stunning ‘four ethers’, a blend of baroque strings, ominous drums, and serpent’s soulful voice.
Refracting its themes through a dark prism, ‘blisters’ treats love as something eerie, mystical, and transcendent in equal parts.
The Haxan Cloak’s heavy and ominous soundscapes paired nicely with serpentwithfeet’s surface aesthetics: eerie, arcane, occult. Label-mate and Bjork-collaborator the Haxan Cloak produced.
Released by TriAngle Records, whose founder Robin Carolan is also serpent’s manager, ‘blisters’ featured five concise but intricate tracks that explored queer experience.
YOUTUBE SERPENTWITHFEET BETTER EARS FULL
A full throttle fusion of each genre at its most melodramatic, serpentwithfeet’s music was a hell of a strong cocktail. If that combination wasn’t unique in itself, the intensity of the approach was. On his stirring first EP, ‘blisters’, serpentwithfeet mixed classical and electronic music with a voice fluent in the sounds of gospel and RnB. It was a surprise, then, when the man wrapped in the iconography of the occult sang like an angel. Altogether, it certainly grabs your attention. The same can be said of the name serpentwithfeet itself, a reference to the prelapsarian snake, the form assumed by the Christian devil to tempt Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. The look was fierce, with an undeniable whiff of the satanic. At the time, he sported a shaved head and strategic eye makeup that made all this defiantly apparent. He has a silver septum piercing that’s roughly the size of an eyeball, along with a variety of other pieces of jewellery. Here’s the thing: serpentwithfeet has a large pentagram tattooed on his head, along with, in thick capital letters, the words “HEAVEN” and “SUICIDE.” (He has grown his hair out since then, obscuring the text, but the pentagram still occupies prime, visible real estate). There’s a good chance you saw him before you heard him. Serpentwithfeet first made his name in 2016. The record is a testament to how giving things time to ferment is good for your art, good for body, good for your soul. Over the course of our conversation, he frequently reminds me, “You got to get your probiotics!” But he means it on a much deeper level as well fermentation, the process by which sugar is gradually converted into acid, is at the root of his new, debut album ‘soil’. Reflecting on his new album in the Fort Greene neighbourhood of Brooklyn, he takes a long pause, reflects, and says, “It’s so beautiful to me to think about fermentation.” He means this quite literally. Josiah Wise, who records under the moniker serpentwithfeet, has been thinking about this a lot in the past year. Put something in the soil, give it time, and there’s a good chance it will return to you better, and stranger. For centuries, cultures around the globe have buried food underground for weeks, even months, then dug it up and eaten its fermented form. Take a closer look, though, and you’ll see that buried things come back more often than not. At first glance, to bury something is to leave it behind. It makes them think of death and decomposition, of bodies turning into bones. Often, people regard this process with discomfort or, worse, disgust. With enough time, a buried thing becomes something completely distinct from what it was. The weight of the earth creates so much pressure that transformation is inevitable. Bury anything deep enough and it will change.
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