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SPELLLING & The Mystery School “Under the Sun“ behind the scenes music video From the album SPELLLING & The Mystery School out now on Sacred Bones Records Listen / buy here: Filmed and directed by Aidan Jung Session footage filmed at Tiny Telephone, Oakland Concert footage filmed at Great American Music Hall, San Francisco Vocals and synthesizer by SPELLLING Bass by Giulio Xavier Cetto Guitar by Wyatt Overson Percussion by Patrick Shelley Piano by Jaren Feeley Backing vocals by Toya Willock and Dharma Moon-Hunter Strings by Del Sol Quartet String Arrangements by Ted Case Engineered by Maryam Qudos at Tiny Telephone in Oakland, CA Recording assisted by Nicole Rowe Mixed by Drew Vandenberg at Chase Park Transduction in Athens, GA Mastered by Joe Lambert at Joe Lambert Mastering SPELLLING, the moniker of the Bay Area experimental pop mastermind Chrystia Cabral, returns with SPELLLING & the Mystery School, a collection of richly envisioned new versions of songs from throughout her critically-acclaimed discography, out August 25 via Sacred Bones. Recorded with her touring band (est. 2021), these reimagined studio tracks follow Cabral’s spellbinding career — from her 2017 breakthrough debut Pantheon Of Me, to 2018’s multidimensional synth-based project Mazy Fly, and her expansive third album, 2021’s The Turning Wheel, breathing new life into the extravagant orchestrations she’s written and produced entirely herself. “With this album, I wanted to capture the ways that these songs have morphed,” Cabral says of SPELLLING & the Mystery School. “They're like my children all grown up in a different stage of their lives, and I wanted to celebrate that.” Throughout SPELLLING & the Mystery School, Cabral’s hypnotizing voice is enveloped in a newly fleshed-out sonic universe of dreamy strings (Del Sol Quartet and Divya Farias), haunting piano (Jaren Feeley), driving trip-hop percussion (Patrick Shelley) and bass (Giulio Xavier Cetto), shredding electric guitar (Wyatt Overson), and drama-intensifying background vocals (Toya Willock and Dharma Moon-Hunter). These brilliant studio recordings are equal parts punky and fastidious, as Cabral wanted to emphasize rich and earthy natural sounds emitting from each player and their instrument. The textural quality of these tracks, mixed with the futuristic underpinnings of her lyrics and the darkly whimsical nature of her songs, create a completely new immersive listening experience. The new LP also demonstrates the chemistry between Cabral and her band that they’ve been building since playing shows behind The Turning Wheel. It’s an accumulation of all the times the group has performed the songs live, paying close attention to the crowd’s reactions. “We’ve picked up little nuances from feeding back and riffing off the audience,” Cabral explains. “Understanding what excites them and or what makes people wanna dance more — we just became aware of those little things and made slight adjustments.” Overall, the album encapsulates the transportative SPELLLING live experience through which Cabral, with her idiosyncratic stage presence, conjures up a spiritual sense of communion and vulnerability among her audience. “I want people to feel like there's alchemy happening and to be aware of the magical parts of sound,” she explains. “Like, this really did come out of thin air.” Cabral plans to bring her otherworldly live set through a special performance with Atlas Obscura this summer, held at Children’s Fairyland, a historical children’s amusement park in Oakland that her own mother used to frequent as a child. There, she will unravel her mythical songs that interrogate ideas of self-concept and political history, aided by the backdrop that will no doubt bring out her music’s other dimensions of playfulness, innocence, curiosity, and joy. The title, SPELLLING & the Mystery School, was born out of a suggestion from her father, who told Cabral of his fascination with early Christian mythics, or spiritual practitioners who led schools to impart their ideas about God and the nature of life. It also ties into Cabral’s former profession as an elementary school art teacher, who found joy in helping unlock the imagination of her students. “When I was with the kids, we were making art, sharing information, and creating these hypothetical worlds,” she explains, revealing her own ethos in creating music and performing as SPELLLING. “We’re just jumping into these realms where there are no real rules.”
