At dawn and at dusk, in the garden at night, in the rain among the stones, the duo Miyaxx wayfinds through the myths, an open-tuned guitar as their compass. This album is their walk. Two musicians: Lea Thomas, a guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter whose excellent 2024 album Cosmos Forever took an expansive turn towards saturation and slowness, and John Thayer, a percussionist, audio engineer, and record producer with a 4th-world slant and an uncanny ability to fold digital manipulations into beautiful recordings of performances. Partnered in life, partnered in music, Hold Your Ego Out Like a Sun, released September 16, is a wonderful fusing, neither nor, both and, a heady third thing, the kind of hybrid work that could only result over a decade of official, unofficial, and everyday collaborations. The two of them are the sole musical contributors to this album, the resulting nighttime fuzz folk very much a product of where their distinct approaches meet.
Having just released the spellbinding track “Blue Cloud White Sky” along with a video, the seductive track “Go Easy.” and today, the velvety title track “Hold Your Ego Out Like The Sun.’ The band says of the track: I was reading Joseph Campbell’s “The Power Of Myth” while we were working on this album and it got me thinking about how, throughout history and across cultures, people have looked to common symbolism like the sun, the crow, fire and song, in hopes to see a part of their story in the greater myths being shared, to feel less alone in their life experiences of grief, love, joy, death.
This album phases between possible worlds, crossfading between moments that feel ostensibly like Thomas singing songs in a room and swirling constructions like “The Shape You Make Returning” that feel like a looming binary tidal wave, a bitcrushed, Loveless wall of noise, the vocals at the center of the mix wordless and tugging, like something Elizabeth Fraser or Liz Harris would sing. But their world is never purely electronic wizardry and never pure acoustic duo. Amid automation and autotune, there is something human, and between the hits of a ride cymbal or the ringing out of a chord there is the crinkle of Thayer’s DAW maneuvers, a natural/digital agitation that brings Mount Eerie to mind. Lullaby melodies that dance between steel string harmonics, modular clicks and clacks like summer bugs and frogs, the bracing cymbal explosions of a drumset entering suddenly. The album’s opener sounds at first like the most sublime moments in the Red House Painters catalog before cascading over a waterfall of distortion. The track “Go Easy” features a toe-tapping bassline that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Broadcast or Massive Attack song. Listen for the occasional field recording delicately peppered in, towering, overdriven flames that approach and consume the sonic space, the geologic rumbling of synthesized bass, the singularly compelling presence of Lea Thomas’ voice, ebbing and flowing, advancing into our ears and receding out into echo.
What is held within? All that has been and all that will be. Our one life dwarfed by the sprawling blanket of stars above, our existence as brief as a single strummed chord, decaying. And yet the harmonics ripple out. This is the sound of two artists at ease in their power, each of their gestures of sound and lyric a rune, a new form of spell that hangs in the air and then dissolves. The growl of our central star in all its impossibly scaled fire heard rumbling through the infinite plate reverb of the cosmos. We turn in the eye of a three-legged crow, its silence the guidance of heaven. Seated before a gathering of the animals, the goddess holds out her ego in the form of the sun and the wolf heeds her intentions – a circular card pulled from a circular deck, a shape with no ending. A cycle, a song, a season. An orbit, a wheel.
