Like most Christian biblical allegories, there's a simple lesson deeply ingrained in our socialization with the Garden of Eden: if you aren't good and moral, you aren't worthy of paradise. Being considered a "good person" seems to remain at the fore in an age of social media advocacy and rampant virtue signalling, but the standards to which one is held in pursuit of this vague perceived goal are more impossible to meet than ever.This brings us to Edwin Raphael's new album, I Know a Garden — a title he couldn't give this body of work without anticipating that it would require an overwrought philosophical introduction referencing the fall of man. For the Montreal-based singer-songwriter, however, the titular garden is "a palace built from childhood memories, made of tiny myths my parents would tell me and this spiritually that I grew up with but hadn't thought about for years," as he explained in a press release; the safest spot on the island that no man is.Though he lived in Dubai most of his childhood before moving to Montreal to attend Concordia, Raphael and his family regularly spent their summers in the house where his mother grew up, deep in a forested area of India's Kerala state. From the space where his memories and dreams have intermingled over the years, further emphasized by a recent trip back to India, the artist has conjured this lush, verdant safe space within himself to return.Inspired by a shaman telling him that he wasn't from this planet in a previous life, "First Time on Earth" is our entry point into both the album and the garden, and perhaps the highest-tempo entry in his œuvre to date. With a head-nodding chorus bolstered by the percussion of drum fills and an effects-drenched elongated vocal ad-lib, it's a call to adventure as galvanizing as it is awestruck. "Everything's uncertain," Raphael sings repeatedly in the bridge, "but it's beautifully designed" — a sentiment that applies to so many aspects of life here on Earth; from love, to the beauty of the natural world, to hope.Bathed in aurora borealis ambience, he spends much of the LP meditating on the different contributing factors to this uncertainty: the experience of being racialized ("Moonstruck"), the helpless witnessing of loved ones' suffering ("It's a Shame You Swim So Well"), and recognizing the impermanence of our fragmentary selves ("Mosaic in the Sun"). The transient light of not belonging to — or being of — one particular place is refracted by the airy atmospherics of I Know a Garden, which seamlessly integrates some new, decidedly more Western instruments into the fuller mix (the delightful saxophone interlude on "Snake on the Road," teeming strings on "Emerald to Gold," "A Sunbeam Lent to Us Briefly," "Moonstruck").Raphael shines in these spaces between surety, fearlessly admitting feelings he can't quite name and is reaching to delineate, which is the reality of digging through so much emotional rubble. The pieces often don't fit into the greater puzzle in any way that makes sense until years — lifetimes, even — down the road. Instead, the singer-songwriter lets his compositions create a flow state, toggling back and forth between thoughtfulness and mindfully being swept away by the somatic sway of the music, which is always gorgeous and mesmeric.More than anything, I Know a Garden is a portal. We often discuss the opposition between music that meets the moment and music that helps us escape it, but Raphael's refreshingly straddles both sides of the spectrum. While being lulled by its opulent its layers, there's a distinct possibility that his piecemeal wisdom will go unregistered, but it feels like there's an element of subliminal messaging to these incantations; they'll needle themselves in over time, the inherited knowledge patiently unearthing itself.Equally about world-building, his 2023 sophomore effort Warm Terracotta felt like the first buds bursting forth from ruddy, granular soil in the springtime; the hard-won results of sifting through un-sustaining matter to find vital nutrients. Despite looking to childlike wonder for inspiration, Raphael feels firmly planted in the summer season of life on I Know a Garden, in a state of mind where he can let his inner child be the one to heal him (and, subsequently, the world). Only he can truly know the garden, but this record presents a beautiful translation of it — and a generous invitation inside.
Wavelength
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