TUNES // Jumo – Aléa

“here’s to opening and upward, to leaf and to sap
and to your (in my arms flowering so new)
self whose eyes smell of the sound of rain”
-e.e. cummings

The first time I read an e.e. cummings poem it took me a full three days to recover. The idea that when you feel sad and someone asks you how you’re feeling, the answer might not really be “sad,” (because that always kind of feels like a lie, right?). It might be the smell of coffee. The way the moon looks at 4am. The reaching for a towel after showering. Or the 12th bar of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
Or what I call happiness might really more accurately be the opening notes of Pachelbel’s Canon.
Anxiety, the vibrato in the top string of a violin.
Soft, velvety bass guitar is the nice kind of sad.
Depression – a low, toneless drone, like a flatlining vitals monitor sounding at half speed.
And something in this song is euphoria. Spongy synths and oversaturated bass. Voices shedding their earthly limitations like spaceships going into orbit.
Check out more of Jumo‘s beautiful music on SoundCloud. Their Nomade EP is out now via French indie label, Nowadays Records. Stream or download here. If you like this sort of thing, keep up to date with Nowadays’ stellar catalogue on their Spotify playlist.