8.20.2021 ~ "Visitations was written and recorded over about two months earlier this year during a period of significant personal change. After recording Far From This World - an album fixated on endings, it felt important to create a counterpart to reflect all the new beginnings that followed. Change always gives and takes. I wanted to try some things on this record I wasn't confident enough to attempt in the past - longer, droning songs and minimal electronic pop. Its title could refer to funeral gatherings, spiritual or divine visitations, the appearance of loved ones in dreams, etc. This album is vaguely about all those things. It's also about distance and time, and how they separate individuals - in proximity and in death, before and after."

Visitations is Orchid Mantis' sixth full length release since 2015, alongside numerous EPs and instrumental projects - a testament to Howard's restless devotion to his craft. At 24, Howard has quietly built a reputation around a unique synthesis of meditative, emotionally direct pop songwriting, surreal instrumental flourishes, and production that sounds worn down by years of sun exposure. The album contains his most optimistic batch of songs to date, but that wasn't the initial goal: "I wanted to make a really quiet, droning record without any electronics; something slower and moodier than what I've done before, which didn't really end up happening." Personal circumstances changed drastically - for the better - and the new compositions took a brighter turn. "I was writing and recording incessantly about this one thing, and ended up with something really focused and hopeful."

The album was assembled quickly and obsessively without second thoughts, in a fashion Howard hadn't pursued since the rudimentary 4-track cassette experiments of his 2014 debut Hessdalen Light. Although the mist of disfigured synths, drum machines and tape fidelity that defined earlier releases is left intact, the album is full of instrumental departures and tweaks to Howard's sound. "There's a lot of acoustic guitar, a choice that carried over from my original ideas for the project. I really wanted to make something more organic. That's why the last few tracks, some of the oldest songs included, embrace more live instrumentation - pianos, clarinets, sampled saxophone, etc."

The middle third features a pair of songs, Change Your Mind and After You Leave, inspired by an ongoing fixation with minimal electronic composers like Rei Harakami, Boards of Canada and Khotin. The lyrics are uncharacteristically referential, reinterpreting literary sources from ancient religion, contemporary fiction and philosophy, while drawing from popular media in equal measure. "There's a couple clear references I'm hoping people will pick up on. I just really enjoy that sort of intertextuality when I listen to music, having a trail of breadcrumbs to follow."

The final track, High Places, is an outlier in Howard's discography, for its length and for its lyrical focus. It is almost entirely acoustic, shifting and evolving around a repeating guitar motif that grounds his unusually straightforward self-reflection on change, memory and the passing of time. The song ends and then begins again, ends and then begins again, droning on and on. As it fades out, you can hear a chair moving, and Howard's voice: "It's gonna loop again in a sec." Audio from an old VHS tape his friend recorded in high school begins to play.

"I'd still be doing this even if no one ever heard it. I get bored if I go too long without it, and if it wasn't music I'd be making something else. The challenge is the point for me. Adjusting the formula, seeing what happens. Iterating just a few more times. Everything else comes and goes, but I get to keep this one thing."