Connan Mockasin’s Faking Jazz Together in Spotlight

A Connan Mockasin song features on an Independent list of most-listened-to tracks the UK newspaper’s staff played the most last year on Spotify.

“Oddly, my most-listened to track of 2016 wasn’t from this year at all, but from 2011. But that’s rather apt for a year marked by death, uncertainty and long-held conventions being cast aside,” lifestyle writer Kashmira Gander explains.

“‘Faking Jazz Together’ from New Zealand musician Connan Mockasin is a song of contradictions. It unfurls over five minutes and 13 seconds but feels too short. It’s as ethereal and dream-like as it is melancholy nightmarish, with its trembling guitars, Mockasin’s high-pitched vocals and cryptic lyrics, After countless listens, I still don’t know what ‘Love that’s forced is borrowed / Eating out for breakfast’ means or what a ‘quadropus’ is. With a song this beautiful, arresting and strangely comforting, I don’t particularly care.”

This year, Mockasin formed a duo with La Priest (Sam Eastgate) and released the album Soft Hair.

Mockasin is originally from Te Awanga. He now lives in Los Angeles.

Original article by Kashmira Gander, The Independent, December 23, 2016.