We all coped differently at the start of the pandemic in March 2020. For Chiara Angelicola—the Guatemalan-Italian who’s been operating as Bird Call for about 15 years, and who should have been on the road touring her latest record, Year of the Dogfish, released a few months prior—it was an especially intense time; she was diagnosed with OCD. So she did what songwriters do: she wrote a song about it and kicked off the process of following up that album.
More music is on the way ‘soon’, but in the meantime we’re delighted to premiere the video for that very song, ‘Tiny Transistor’, a fascinating song that twists and turns through multiple dynamic shifts, a current of unease running underneath the entire thing. Per the Los Angeles-based Angelicola: “[The song] was written as I was being clinically diagnosed with OCD during the first wave of the pandemic. I spent several months not being able to leave my house because I literally thought the virus was on my doorstep. I was so grateful I was able to still write and exercise my craft because much of my time in isolation I felt incapacitated. The song is inevitably a story about my journey through that time, the incessant internal chatter, and the process of quieting the prattling worries of the mind through music. The creative process of making records has always allowed me an opportunity to heal and empower myself after [these] experiences[.]”
The Martín Yarnazian-directed video is below; keep your eyes peeled for more from Bird Call later in the year.
[…] Back in August, we indicated there was further new music to come from the Guatemalan-Italian Chiara Angelicola, who hadn’t released anything as Bird Call since the pandemic outbreak put the skids on touring for her previous record, late 2019’s Year of the Dogfish. She broke her silence with ‘Tiny Transistor’, and today returns in earnest with The Life is Extraordinary, a seven-song EP. […]