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In Ursula K. Le Guin’s legendary high fantasy landmark the Earthsea Cycle, shadows are conceived as animate entities, presences that seek to inhabit a living body to turn it into a gebbeth. A gebbeth is a physical shell of a living being consumed by the power of shadow, taken over and transformed into an instrument of the shadow’s dark designs. On her album closer to the thing that fled, Susu Laroche explores this process, utilising her singular, fever dream vocals as an instrument to simulate this shadow, her writhing, reverb-laden dabke compositions representing her efforts to shrug off the darkness, to resist the transformation into a gebbeth. With washing touch off, Laroche visualises this process in a surreal movement sequence, smudged with luminous film grain. “After meeting Leila when we performed together at Nighthawks at Ormside Projects in December, 2022, the idea for this video was born,” Laroche explains. “I wanted to shoot something simple and kind of classic. Since I always like to work w
