This minimalistic, fresh, and sometimes amorphous exploration of the Ethereal Pop style Osmunda coined as her own, feels like it's caressing our inner hearts. Instead of trying to entangle our heads under a love song's coop, it pursues the vacant spaces of meditation lingering in our subconscious borders. She commits to her music's development entirely with the intention of jutting her beaming love outwards for all to explore. Weaved, stitched, and wrapped in enchantment, these refreshing numbers exude their individual uplifting and empowering messages with a delicate and supple nature. She explores inner peace and world peace, self-acceptance, gratefulness, love, purpose, and even the in-between moments when sensibility meets inner strength. Extending further into feelings that mirror looking within yourself for light, and when you're ready to grow but anxious in accepting it. On 'Sending My Love,' Osmunda displays each message with an ethereal presence, sounding more like an earth goddess in her presentation and the positivity in her voice, as she guides us on this positive journey of growth.
The New Mexico-raised, Los Angeles-based enchantress, and songstress show complex taste in her musical endeavors. Rebecca Trujillo Vest began her vocation as a singer with the band "Space babies," and after a listening session on their Spotify page, it's easy to see that the singer is a force of nature. Conducted by her fascination with the alternative and more uncovered grounds of ethereal pop, she infuses each passing note with swelling energy. Her nurtured impulse to create something innovative using minimal components also informs the music she makes as "Osmunda," pulling from classic soul, pop, R&B, and world music. Her breakout project, the earthy and resonating Munda, merited her an eager fanbase, but 'Sending My Love' is far more published with purpose. She wrote and recorded it while staying home in Los Angeles in quarantine. She describes its songs as leaves of expression from upliftments and thoughtful reflections found within the melodies she has made up.
The thirteen tracks feel less like a radio dance song selection and more like snippets from a smile mediation. Her elusive and atmospheric compositions resemble the multicolored and down stepped halves of St. Vincent's "Strange Mercy"; even when the songs seem independent, they are still bound by a shared beautiful, uplifting concept. Brief and powerful yet somehow ghostly, they share a sort of dreamlike landscape through the albums run time. A majority are over four minutes; some play with a chanted flowing hymn, others with a mantra-like structure. The whimsically slow escalator ride of "Golden Light" continuously shift in and out of sight, transforming into an echoing encantation explaining the concept of inner ascension into the light. Many songs do not have riffs or hooks; they settle in a meditating chant or empowering hymn until they evaporate like when "A Loving World" blends seamlessly into "Grateful." The fluidity of her mindset mirrors the grace with which she transforms between one deep introspection to the next empowering message disguised in song.
Many tracks feature world music melodies and percussive sounding rhythmic support, featuring tambourines and bells as usual suspects. The textures belong someplace on the scale between Global Music and Ethereal Pop with Experimental. But still, Osmunda's sound is unique in its abidance to lo-fi minimalistic aesthetics and her rendering of spiritually profound attunement. The songs on 'Sending My Love' feels like being forever engaged within a continuous fifty-three-minute meditative experience and, "I Believe," is full of these distinctive moments that solidify that feeling. Here, Osmunda is much more confident of her healing abilities as an artist, centering her ideas around self-reflection, and self-growth through love.
Her whole project feels relaxed and usually carries the natural tone of an interior soliloquy—introspective and questioning. Her songs bring forth clear directions, overwhelming us with emotions the way good movies do—with hyper-expressive imagery and full unconcealed passion. The record was built on the framework of trying to nurture a loving consciousness unto its listener, and not just to relax the audience. She invites us to engage in the music and actively look within ourselves to find the same feelings her music speaks about. With hypnotic and endless angelic inflections and symmetries, she provokes feelings of letting go and humming along like on "Shine Our Love," where she sings, "on this life, love is here for all of us," embracing the light and empowerment with all of her vibratos. Later, she sings, "let's open our mind, let's open our hearts," on "Create For Love," an accepting song about endeavoring to make the world a better play through acceptance. It's a highlight of the album with its profound lyrics, "magic and art, love in our hearts."
What might initially examine as an aimless or unenthused approach to indie music, is actually a profound push for the mindset all genres should bestow unto their listeners—invigorated with emotion. Her loving expression comes into a defined core on "Sending My Love," and the most significant improvements here are her angelic vocal cantors and her fulfilling grasp over her audacious spirit. She has spoken about warping her creations around spiritual growth in the past, and about helping to express strong values and guidance in advancing this world into something more wholesome, and she delivers it here with this record.
The wavering harmonies on "Be My Greatest Self" expresses outward over the drums' cool beat, the reverbs echoes cross and bend pitch from in and out of tune whimsically. The spoken-word flows unravel into a chant that sweeps in and out of a daydream like a melody and into a poetic breath of fresh air. Next, the expansive productions during "I Am The Sun," finds her in a duet with the lower registers of her voice, and with "Be Here Now," she devastates with her enamoring lo-fi and whispering chants. Her singing has garnered a presence that resembles a parent or earth goddess, if only in the way she is embracing and caring.
Throughout 'Sending My Love,' Osmunda is maturing as a distinctive and extraordinary artist. Even when it's passed, and we're just sitting here silent, a sense of afterglow is present, and it can only be achieved from these hymns of self-growth and empowerment.
What are some of the emotions you're feeling right now amongst the climate of our current events and this lingering pandemic, and how has it affected the release of "Sending My Love"?
The inspiration for “sending my love” came at the beginning of the “stay at home” lockdown. I felt that I could help during this crisis by sending messages of love & positivity to the world. I created one per week & offered them as free downloads on SoundCloud. As a result of being created very quickly, the songs are all minimal & fresh.
For the most part, I feel gratitude and oneness with humanity and the planet, but at times I might experience other emotions as we weather this pandemic… like the idea that more disruptive events are on the horizon due to climate change and global warming. Some of the ways that I help to relieve my own stress are walking, running, doing yoga, making music – anything to release the endorphins.
I allow myself to feel the feelings that come up instead of distracting myself from them. Through my music, I have created an avenue through which love and hope can flow in both directions.
Where did you record this production, and what was your experience like? Did you have a supporting team helping you along the way?
The first song that I wrote for the album was ‘golden light’ and it was the only one done before the lockdown. It was done at my studio in Venice – Earthstar Creation Center. Shortly after that, the lockdown began and from my makeshift, home studio, I began the “one song per week” approach that eventually birthed “Sending My Love”. I would create simple chants, with minimal lyrics (far more minimal than my usual songs) and equally minimal accompaniment & then send them off to my co-creator John X Volaitis – often, I would send him the tracks on Wednesday & he would be done by Friday – a challenge to minimalist & beautiful production. Looking back now, would there be anything you would have liked to incorporate further in this album?
If anything, it would have been wonderful to have been joined by some of my other musical cohorts. Normally, I would embrace the participation of my talented friends & colleagues. Alas, the lockdown & time constraints really limited the options for collaboration. What can we expect from you artistically with your new upcoming releases coming out this year as we press further propel deeper into all the uncertainty that 2020 brings with it?
Prior to the lockdown, I had just started putting together a different collection of songs for what would have been my third album. Now that “sending my love” has been released into the Multiverse, I am already in the process of preparing what will be my as yet unnamed fourth album.
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