♫♪  Joseph Bastardo - “Rhododendrons”

Every year, my wife and I take me moms out to the New York Botanical Gardens. As the vegetation typically changes seasonally — although annually everything remains rotated and fairly consistent — the trip is never planned, but typically coincides with an event or holiday. This year, we’re going for her birthday celebration on Sunday, and eventually making our way down to Chinatown from the Bronx (which sounds like AND WILL BE a nightmare). Although, always when we walk around the various species of plant life, my mind can never stop thinking about how each photosynthetic organism interacts with the growing world we all live in. Like, cellphones can give people tumors and cancer and shit. Imagine the long-term exposure to WiFi. And some people think dark-matter is jutting as black-holes constantly throughout the Earth, we just can see them or experience it since they’re so small, but plants are small. Lots of plants are smaller plants attached to larger plants THAT ARE STILL SMALL!

Thankfully, Phinery found Joseph Bastardo. Upon his newest album deCordova — [potentially] named after the sculpture park and museum in Massachusetts — Joseph explores these vegetative thoughts within “Rhododendrons,” the increasingly growing and molding track that evolves in sound-color across listeners’ minds like a root system waving from speakers to nodes. On the one-up, Tristan Whitehill (a.k.a. Euglossine, a.k.a. owner of Squiggle Dot) created a marvelous video for the track that is just along the outrageous modes of thinking he and Joseph explore as musicians. RE: “thankfully” there are people out here like these two (including the CEO of Phinery) making geeks like me feel a little more normal than daily society provides my mentality.

Scope deCordova below by Joseph Bastardo on Phinery (OUT NOW!!!) and snoop the Tristan Whitehill directed video of “Rhododendrons” above for max feels! None of us are alone:

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

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