Restless Mosaic launches ‘Lost Within This Time’ single featuring Lovespirals singer Anji Bee on vocals – Out now
Restless Mosaic and Anji Bee (Photo by Brandon Isleib & Anji Bee)
Out today is the brand new video from Restless Mosaic (a.k.a. Brandon Isleib), “Lost Within This Time“, featuring Lovespirals’ icon Anji Bee. The single is the first taste of his forthcoming third album “Quality Mirrors”, due out on March 7. The song was developed around elevator samples that came to form four separate layers of this song.
Apart from Anji Bee, the “Quality Mirrors” album features contributions by New York singer-songwriter Rose Alaimo and rapper Declaime (Aloe Blacc, Madlib, and Flying Lotus), with whom Restless Mosaic is already working on a new album that brings Declaime’s poetry to Isleib’s back catalog of instrumentals.
As of January 14, “Lost Within This Time” is available everywhere, including Apple Music, Spotify and Bandcamp. The full “Quality Mirrors” album will be released on March 7.
About the new Restless Mosaic video
In the video, Anji plays a ghost haunting an elevator. With Restless Mosaic (a.k.a. Brandon Isleib) and Anji Bee residing on opposite ends of the USA, they shot their scenes separately. Portraying a ghost who lures Isleib into her haunted elevator â where she lives in a concert poster. Now entrapped, she transmits his soul into the poster, essentially taking her place. Isleib explains, “My home city let me and my producer film in a city-owned office building that hasnât been used in years â a perfect setting to make a campy â80s horror story”.
“‘Lost Within This Time’ is about my mental state post-pandemic. Like many, Iâm finding it hard to re-acclimate. Places I used to go have closed. I quit doing the things I used to do. Many people I thought I knew either disappeared or showed sides that made me pull away. Society both on and offline seems much more hostile, and as a consequence Iâve become guarded,” says Anji Bee.
Restless Mosaic and Anji Bee collaboration
“Working with Brandon let me express my thoughts in a slightly edgier manner, as the instrumental he presented me with is a lot more experimental. The elevator sounds, in particular, are quite eerie, so I had fun playing that up with an ethereal refrain of âIâm lostâ â which sounds like it could be a ghost calling up the elevator shaft, or wandering down a long, dark hallway.”
Brandon Isleib is an electronic songmaker based in Everett, Washington. “I met Anji Bee through the listening party for the remaster of Love Spirals Downwardsâ ‘Flux’ album. I had noticed sheâd made a lot of different song styles, many of them dark, so I inquired about a collaboration. When she expressed interest, I started composing a sort of gothic metal song but swapping out all the sounds for â80s synth-jazz instead â something to fit both Anjiâs angel and chanteuse sides,” explains Brandon Isleib.
“That fit nicely with samples recorded of a creepy elevator in a hotel I had stayed at, and I started building the next part of the song around that. That gave the most space for Anji to put a verse, but she surprised me by wanting to make the denser chorus music into the verse. The ensuing rearrangement yielded the unusual structure of starting as a full-fledged synth song, then going into a barely melodic industrial phase, then gradually introducing both halves to each other. I draw a lot of inspiration from Underworldâs production style: set up the songâs rules and then start breaking them. ‘Lost Within This Time’ does this while showcasing Anjiâs versatility and ability to make the bizarre sound right.”
Anji Bee adds, “The frenetic, skittering energy in the first part seemed suited to my lyrics’ theme. The fretless bass reminded me of music I loved in the ’80s, like Mick Karn and Kate Bush. I tried to channel their vocal theatricality in my performance. Though Iâm best known as a singer, Iâve dabbled in spoken word for decades, and I enjoyed incorporating a bit of that too. This is a personal lyric, but I think itâs pretty universal, and I hope that others in a similar period of their life will find some comfort in the song.”
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