Indigo Sparke established herself on the Australian music scene in 2016 releasing herself-produced EP Night Bloom. In the years since, she has moved between New York, Minneapolis and LA, traveling through terrifyingly vast deserts and mountains, with seemingly endless highways and empty motel rooms. Her debut album Echo was co-produced by Adrianne Lenker and Andrew Sarlo, and is out now.
I think there was a period of time when I was almost laughing at how sad I was in the space of ambiguous liminal love. If you don’t start laughing, you just cry more. It’s a feeling when you are kind of sick to your stomach and anxious but excited and not knowing what the fuck is going on. The space of waiting. Waiting to know someone else’s truth, or waiting to see someone, or waiting to see what the future holds for you and that person, or waiting to see if it’s even real. Everything becomes that person, everything reminds you of that person, everything speaks that person’s name. It’s a bittersweet thing.
We read these story books as kids or are shown these movies depicting fairy tale endings or Hollywood romance and it’s such a trick. It never goes like that. Things are never so textbook “perfect.” I like the story of Humpty Dumpty. I think it was first that Alice (in wonderland) came across Humpty as an egg that grew and became more human — in another story, or the nursery rhyme, Humpty fell off the wall and none of the soldiers could put him back together again.
I think that’s how I felt, or maybe how a lot of people feel in love. Like a bit of a broken egg, wondering if people will love us with our trauma, our complex histories, cracks and all. Maybe love is the wabi sabi glue that puts us back together in some way.
“Colourblind” is a song and story of longing. I wanted to show the duality of love and time and space in the video. I remember becoming obsessed with Paris, Texas when I was younger. “A disheveled man who wanders out to the desert, seems to have no idea who he is.” I really felt and feel like that. There was solace for me in watching him in the huge endless desert, being only with himself, with his longing, with his history and the immense weight of his feelings; a silence in him holding it all. And something about the distance between the two characters is heart wrenching. All of their history and love, all of my history and love, an intoxicating sweeping montage of landscapes and memories stored in the time capsule of our bodies, decaying.
I feel like I am all characters and all versions — the man, the woman, the child. I am trying to reconcile the distance in myself between these parts and also in life outside of myself, ever spiralling. What is the distance between love and fear, the distance between words and silence, the space between the body and mind and the soul, the landscapes between lovers. I don’t know. It’s a pendulum. I’m trying to find a gentle home inside of the trailing questions and the wind and the sky.
The dance between intimacy and space is an interesting thing to understand for me, a fine line or precipice. I have been wondering if perhaps we have been trained in society to betray ourselves and others for love, in love, to keep, to have, to hold. How we sometimes abandon ourselves to stay, or leave.
What does it mean to roam alone in the wilderness. There is bravery in loving and there is bravery in being alone. In every form there can be a merging with something greater. It’s all immense when there is true surrender. That’s the hard part. Staying open, staying vulnerable. Through all the pain. To keep loving. Keep trusting.
— Indigo Sparke
(Photo Credit: Monica Buscarino)
