YOUR BACK IS TURNED TO A KALEIDOSCOPE OF GREEN AND BLUE, THUNDERING WAVES DROWNING A TREELINE THAT VANISHES INTO THE HORIZON. 

[TURN BACK]             [ENTER]

YOU VENTURE TO ENTER THE ENCHANTING DERELICTION. 

THE DOOR SWINGS OPEN BEFORE YOUR PALMS PRESS AGAINST THE FLAKING PAINT, ANTICIPATING YOUR ARRIVAL. A NOISE RIPPLES TOWARD YOU. THE GENTLE, MEANDERING MEW OF A CAT, SO INDISCERNIBLY SOFT IT COULD HAVE BEEN THE CREAKING OF A CUPBOARD. A ROCKING CHAIR REMAINS IN PERPETUAL MOTION, EMPTY, PROPELLED, AS IF THROUGH PREDESTINATION – A LINGERING VITALITY OF A LOVE THAT ONCE BOUNCED ALONG THE STILL-STANDING FRAME OF THE HOUSE.

[LEAVE]          [TAKE A SEAT]

THE WALLS COME TO COLOR AS A MEMORY COMES TO FILM. LIGHT LEAKS INTO THE SCAFFOLDING OF A LIFE NEARLY ABANDONED, FILLING THE ROOM. THROUGH THE WINDOWS YOU CAN SEE A RED SKY. THE AIR INSIDE IS THICK, CHARGED WITH A WARNING… NO ONE WAS HERE, BUT HAD THEY JUST LEFT? OR WERE THEY SOON BACK?

[CONTINUE]

Hannah Pruzinsky is no stranger to the transience of seeking refuge. Having grown up in a conservative enclave of eastern Pennsylvania, they inevitably became adept at finding secret creative outlets, safe houses for expression, at a very early age. “My mom says I sang before I talked,” Pruzinsky says, succinctly characterizing an understanding that only a child could have – sometimes simple language is too constrained, too fallible, to be truly expressive. “It was something I rejected sharing with people for a long time, never singing in front of my parents or friends, refusing to sing in cars for a long time. Pretty paralyzed with anxiety and fear.” Their wandering eyes and isolated thoughts cast projections around, eventually angling upward to a view of a more colorful, safe universe. “My brother is eleven years older than me and was one of my only windows into a world that wasn’t Catholic and conservative.  He played music, had piercings, a green mohawk… I think what my brother showed me, pieces of an alternative kind of life, stayed deeply with me.”

As most young people who have a mohawked idol in their lives do, Pruzinsky moved to New York at the age of eighteen, a place they consider to be “extremely important” to the continued refinement of the creative spirit that predated their full grasp of a properly structured sentence. The city’s pervasive atmosphere of sonder seeped through the thinly constructed protective walls of adolescence and perfectly suited their proclivity for private worlds. “There’s something about encountering a stranger on any given day of my life that has a magic that only big cities can hold.” In a new life entirely their own, they had found a limitless place that they could reach and pull into themselves.

Now, over ten years later, their foundational attachment to the city has only deepened. They write and perform in the project Sister. alongside longtime friend and former roommate Ceci Sturman, with whom they also coordinate and collectivize a New York City music journal called GUNK – an incredibly vital and developing collection of show listings, essays, poems, classifieds, and a number of other hearths local artists may huddle around to find inspiration in a shared pursuit of the unknowable. In this, they fulfill a noble and unenviable responsibility as a critical nexus point for a community’s entire localized communication network – the center of a spiderweb, a tether between two disparate shouts into the void. 

The young child that once sang secrets into an old recorder had grown, through periods of love, unmaking, and a zeal for connection, into their own alternative ideal, a sounding board for the creative curiosity of others. However, the anxieties of being known that had gripped them from a young age matured alongside Pruzinsky. “I started to notice my invasive thoughts really spiraling and loudening as I was entering into a period of stability in my relationship, attempting to settle into a domestic homeostasis. The more time I had to sit and be still in a thing, the more I interrogated myself and my role within my own life, within a relationship, in the context of loving and being loved by another person.” It is from the blessings and curses that come from these well-worn attempts at self-recognition through the other that their newest album, Red sky at morning, was born.

If their debut record No Glory represented a sinking into a new love with a wide-eyed and vulnerable abandon, Red sky at morning reckons with the calm after the torrent, the future it may represent, and the past it may unearth. The title is lifted from a 2000+ year old proverb that finds itself cited in the New Testament: 

Red sky at night, sailors' delight.

Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.

Traditionally used by mariners, Pruzinsky gives contemporary meaning to trudging forward into an unknown horizon at all costs. “I am drawn to the fact that so many people put their thoughts and beliefs into the sky, the mere color of it. That we can see things somewhere else, perhaps above, far beyond, that are to come to pass. To see a red sky above themselves, an outright warning of potential peril and collapse, and to still choose to go forward into something. In a lot of ways, that is what all of this is for myself with writing, with specifically writing these songs tied to my mental health. If you know something is going to be uncovered or difficult or treacherous, how do you proceed with that warning sign?”

This treacherous uncovering comes to light within the album as though unearthing a pristine collection of snow globes, each track polishing them free of their obfuscation and neatly ordering their crystalline, preserved snapshots next to one another. Co-producer Felix Walworth’s time spent in seminal, cosmic indie bands like Florist and Told Slant shines through in the skittering Wurlitzer and electronics, floating errantly and quietly throughout the explorative folk framework of Pruzinsky’s storytelling, whose vocals gently dance through inhale, exhale, the breath of a spiral. “Arrival” is a slowly unraveling negotiation between dependency and control, a frozen and fraught moment of domesticity as morphine. “Promises start in the house / Board up the doors, paradise is found / There is no point where we give out / Sure of arriving, sure to stay awhile.” There’s an undeniable warmth present throughout the album that, at times, approaches discomfort – an ozone of familiarity crackling, rupturing for a brief moment of downpour as memories swell to a potency incapable of passivity any longer. The fabled specters of love, fear, surrender, and obsession materialize, taking their seat across the table to engage in spirited debate over the places they deserve and demand in Pruzinsky’s life. The tender viscera they leave behind is uniquely evident in “Your Hands,” a cycling recommitment to knowing and loving another despite never knowing how it will end.

Not an inch of sonic square footage is wasted, with saxophone swells and meandering, plinking synths spilling across the songs like a mountain of books that quickly became too expansive to adorn shelves alone, kudzu of a life lived between aspirations and a shortness of breath. “Krista” ups the ante of optimism several notches into siren territory, drunk on the potential of surrendering to desire – “You can feel the longing if you let it in.” The clumsy imperfections of this arrangement are something Pruzinsky takes a sly joy in. “The original form of this song was heavily reliant on a manically sloppy piano part I had written in our apartment. I pride myself on making piano parts without really knowing any music theory anymore. It feels more like a spiritual act when I don’t feel led to play certain things.” Shift only one track prior, however, and you find something that could only have been formed at the end of a divine lead – “Force” is a sparsely constructed, yet unbelievably potent, showcasing of Pruzinsky’s ability to conjure a memory. Set against a single, contemplative fingerpicked loop that attempts to direct unruly, ghostly pianos and synthesizers, they bring vivid color through low tones to a youth that often comes to mind in times of uncertainty:

Cars crash in a circle on the big race day

It was a killing in your pocket

Started betting on decay

Filling up my old car on the other side of town

Saw you inside at the counter 

Said you’d call if you’re around.

“My mother used to quote the red sky proverb to me growing up. I didn’t realize it had biblical origins for a long time… many years have felt like a homecoming back to my creative start in childhood,” Pruzinsky admits. Wrestling with the twin fears of solitude and reliance and an escape from a life that disallowed an expression of their truest self, Red sky at morning simultaneously heeds the call of the journey while working to construct a momentary shelter from the storm – whether it arrives in the dawn or dusk of our lives. It is the story of a wayfinder relinquishing control and allowing the mutinous chaos of love to chart a path to an acceptance of some great stillness. Shuffling across worn floorboards, polished from overuse, that point toward calmer waters, trying to unlearn the frantic pace of introspection, the goal is evident in the hopeful refrain of “Arrival” – “I can clear the cycle.”