It’s an intense feeling, realizing that the greatest ghost story you know might be your own. But Gish is accustomed to that level of darkness.
The Southern New Hampshire artist — a.k.a. Jacalynn Manning — ordinarily personifies ol’ tales of phantoms with avant-garde folk tunes, as she did with her 2019 release The Stitcher. Yet when it came time to pen new music during the pandemic, Manning understood that the most compelling tales of terror might be hiding in her diary.
Her new EP Febris / Felidae / Filum (released February 11) takes a temporary step away from old-fashioned folklore and instead expresses distress over a very modern problem: Literal years of isolation.
“I almost look at completing this project as me desperately trying to reunite with my sense of self after everything these past two years,” Manning tells Vanyaland, reflecting on the COVID-19 pandemic. “I knew I wanted to make music but I felt like I had no idea who I was.”
For the moment, her one-woman show was lost in the shadows. But if Manning could wrangle the supernatural, she could wrangle her own songwriting, too. While she searched for herself, she focused on evolving her sound, adding extra flourishes to her ambient whispers.
“I wanted to explore using live instruments, ambient sounds, and getting purposefully weird with key signatures and harmonies,” she adds. “I spent more time learning about modal keys and how to tilt the song in and out of them to create more uncertain feelings… My partner plays the violin on the EP, so I was also able to direct him in making ambient textures and percussion by strumming the strings in certain ways to give more breadth to the sound.”
While Manning calls the four-song EP as a “deviation” from her usual work, Febris / Felidae / Filum succeeds as an introspective sequel to The Stitcher. If anything, her spectral sentiments seem more tangible than before, considering how often themes of loneliness and dread permeate pop culture.
“When life calmed down, I could hear the songs in my head all at once,” she notes. “The whole EP came together really fast, like it was meant to be.”
It’s one ghost story that truly comes alive every time you press play.