I had followed Alyson Greenfield for a few years now, and I’ve always known her as an experimental musician, combining instruments like the synthesizers, glockenspiel, piano, jazzy vocals and the occasional rap. As I get to know Alyson more, further Music Historian – which now welcomes many different artists from all corners of the country – and study the music consumer in greater depth, I realize that Alyson’s music might be a favorite among lovers of surrealist music.
Last Thursday, at the Cameo Gallery in Brooklyn, Alyson gave her fans and closest followers a celebration that marked the completion of one long journey for this artist – the premiere of her music video for “Uncharted Places.” Known for creating dreamy sounds within her chords, the theme of ‘dream’ is strongly reflected in this music video. In this short film, she falls into bed and wakes up in another dimension with wings strapped to her arms. Joining her in the video is the beatboxer who also recorded this song with Alyson, Shane Maux.
Alyson takes to the sky, time traveling across her own journey. She stumbles upon an event in which she is sailing on a pirate ship with Shane. Below the deck, the two dance to Shane’s beats while Alyson gracefully supports a vintage lantern within her hand, like the one that is found in the hands of Rider-Waite’s tarot card, The Hermit. The journey ends with an accident, and our video heroine sinks to the bottom of the ocean, but all is not lost, and there is certainly no room for sadness. Viewers are reminded that this journey is a dream, especially when our lovely lady is carried to shore and crawls up the beach to what is a beautiful billowy bed. Our beatbox hero survives as well, just in a different dimension. The two might have not begun their journey together, nor ended it as she prepared to exit her dream and wake up to the real world, but the viewer will be left feeling the hero will join the dreamer on their next adventure, whenever it comes along.
Alyson describes “Uncharted Places” as a song about the continuity of life– that no life, dream, idea or human being, ever really cease to exist. In the chorus, she sings You open my mind to uncharted places/ and I know, in the end/ the only thing that matters is your friends/ and I know in the end, the body won’t matter at all/ and I know, in the end/ we’ll just return back to where we began (this line repeats three times). Just like the song, the music video incorporates a few themes, including returning and transcendence. I find the theme about coming back to certain moments, or having certain moments return to you, also appears in her music and composition.
Aside from premiering a music video, Alyson also performed some new original music with Shane, and fellow musicians Nate Morgan and Interroben. The multi-instrumentalist will always have a synthesizer and digitized music play alongside her in all of her tracks, but rarely will Alyson play every instrument she knows in one song. Throughout her 1-hour set, she rapped with Shane in a song called “Build it Up,” a song inspired by the residential development she sees in her own neighborhood. Alyson then went to the glockenspiel for the song, “Dance Myself.”
The one song that stood out to me was the song “Lust,” which had that same dreamy synth feel, but with more of a staccato dance rhythm and melody with more accidentals that made for an intriguing addition to Alyson’s typical repertoire. “Uncharted Places” might remind us that the physical realm is more ephemeral and less ethereal than we typically believe, but “Lust” dares listeners to take comfort within the excitedly spooky idea that Alyson directly communicated to her audience that night – “underneath our skin and bodies, we are all just skeletons.”
Like her music video directed by David Franklin, Alyson has a penchant for taking listeners, and lovers of surrealist music, to new territory, whether they help us rise above the clouds, bring us below the earth or on the earth’s surface to the rising residential blocks of East Bushwick in New York City. Alyson shows us there is so much to explore in her music – some of these explorations might be short, and some will span over a longer time. Wherever and whenever one journey ends, another one begins, and the music video for “Uncharted Places” reminds us of these transitions.
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