Los Angeles artist Aarktica, aka Jon DeRosa (Black Tape for a Blue Girl) announces the release of his tenth album, We Will Find The Light, via Darla Records.
The album beautifully traverses through ambient and folk genres, with a message of healing. Gentle acoustic plucking, haunting string arrangements, and subtle, comforting electronic atmospheres showcase Aarktica’s prowess in bridging all sides of his sonic spectrum in eleven songs.
“The album is about this idea that once we acknowledge certain wounds, weaknesses or unpleasant feelings, and instead of ignoring them,” say Derosa “we dive headfirst into the darkness and face everything that is terrifying, there’s at least the possibility (and more so, the likelihood) that we will come out on the other end feeling stronger and more empowered.”
DeRosa hadn’t felt inspired to write music for several years. “I had been telling myself, ‘I have nothing to say,’” he says, “but after a certain amount of time, and trying everything I knew to break through, it began to feel like perhaps I was just done, nothing left in the tank.” To get to answers on whether his drive for making music was really in his heart, or because he was trying to chase some notion of success, DeRosa held a private Somatic healing ceremony for himself on New Years Eve, and sat with his emotional and spiritual blockage.
What began to bubble up was uncomfortable and unpleasant. DeRosa had a realization that with all the music he made in the past none of it was truly personal. He had always created characters and personas, and had only written about personal experience from an arm’s length. To move forward, he was going to have to approach writing from a truly authentic place.
“Eventually I picked up a guitar and started playing, and that marked the beginning of how this album came to be. Something truly shifted. All the songs with the exception of the covers were written in a matter of a few months after this.”
The album is cinematic, introspective and spiritual; his gentle baritone and folk-adjacent approach akin to Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, John Cale, Gordon Lightfoot, and Richard Hawley. They’re secular hymns, melancholic yet hopeful; a gently cinematic soundtrack to trauma healing.
DeRosa has spent the last two decades charting his way across cosmic terrains and ambient soundscapes through patience, experimentation, and energetic channeling. DeRosa recording guitar experiments on a four-track cassette recorder in his college dorm after going permanently deaf in his right ear.
“I was having aural hallucinations,” says DeRosa. “Everything I knew as sonically ‘normal’ suddenly changed. When I started Aarktica, it was a bit like a sonic journal, trying to recreate and reinterpret sounds as I was hearing them.” These recordings, which would become No Solace in Sleep, translated those classical musical forms he’d studied for years to electric guitar, stretched them into infinity, soaked them in reverb and delay, and created an entirely new sound identity that would evolve over the years.
The ambitious project marks his first collaboration with Grammy-nominated producer Lewis Pesacov. The album is available on all streaming services,
This is the first physical release from Aarktica since 2009’s In Sea and the first full-length since 2019’s Mareación.
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