The Bedroom Witch, Los Angeles-based dark synth-pop project of performance artist Sepehr Mashiahof, has just revealed “My Only,” a video single from her upcoming album, A Place of Hurt, scheduled for 04 November 2022 via Psychic Eye and Ratskin Records on CD, vinyl, and digital.
In “My Only,” The Bedroom Witch creates a blissful, euphonious sonic marriage of synthesizer, voice, and drum sounds all her own. Precise patterns of uptempo drum programming fortify a groove for Mashiahof’s voice to glide off, like ice crystal shards melting off a razor’s edge of an ancient cliff and falling into the darkness below. “My Only” traverses equally melancholic and euphoric sonic landscapes rich with architecture, emotion, complexity, and soul, harkening to a futuristic Kate Bush that quantum leaps ten thousand years into the future.
Surrounded by latex and bondage-clad, dancing “healers” in a scarlet room, Mashiahof confronts her inner demons in the video, embodied as otherworldly circus-like creatures moving synchronously in bright red chadors. Ropes and roses restrain The Bedroom Witch inside a ritual circle, as she’s sacrificed to a statue of herself representing trauma and eroded identity.
Mashiahof states, “‘My Only’ is a song about coping mechanisms, like getting through difficult feelings through substance dependencies. It’s about those most honest moments of recognition of our own self-sabotaging behavior. We all go through it, but how do we get out of it? For me, it meant coming to terms with the fact that I am in this body, for this lifetime. Somewhere, there’s power in realizing you’re stuck with yourself.”
In the dreamlike video sequences directed by Sepehr’s sister Sepand Mashiahof, the healers and demons appear at once synchronized and distant. Sepehr explains, “The red room is sparse in furnishings but rich in color, and represents the tumultuous inside of our souls. The healers, the demons, the sacrifice and the idol are all interconnected here. It’s about having terror of the pain you know will accompany growth, but promising yourself you’ll still go far in your healing.”
