Artist of the Week: DM Stith

Hometown: Bloomington, Ind. via Brooklyn and Buffalo, N.Y.
Album: Heavy Ghost
For Fans Of: Castanets, Wooden Wand, Sufjan Stevens

As the son of a choir director and pianist, young David Stith was positioned to follow a similarly musical path. But at age eight, he began refusing to sing; for the next two decades, he instead turned his focus to visual art. A few years ago though, after he befriended Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond and helped her record her debut album, Bring Me the Workhorse, Stith finally began making music of his own. Shortly after, he connected with Asthmatic Kitty (the label also home to Worden) and then spent a year recording his own debut wherever he could find the space for his equipment or a piano to borrow. 

Much of that album, Heavy Ghost (out March 10), hinges on the tensions between perception and experience. “I've been really fascinated by some ideas about the functioning dichotomies of the mind,” Stith explains via email. “The crux of this idea... is that these different selves, these voices that influence the way we behave, these bundles of memory and self-protection, are things we can't rid ourselves of.” His exploration of this “poetry of the private experience” has resulted in an album where nothing can quite be pinned down, even stories as familiar as an archetypal tale of sacrifice or a moment of loss and anxiety.

This sense of precise ambiguity is abetted by Stith's strong sense of atmospherics: His arrangements are full-bodied but spacious, with the multi-tracked vocals occasionally hidden in the ethereal, heavily layered music. The effect is haunting; when Stith sings, “I have been sleeping with the lights on,” it's easy to understand why. At times, he seems to be traveling through a dimly lit cave, but elsewhere, especially on "Fire of Birds," he feels like a guide to heavenly ascension.

For all of his sound's near-transcendence, though, Stith continually returns to the physical. “I'm not a person that thinks a lot about the supernatural,” he says. “Ghost, for me was a metaphor, not mysticism.” And despite the musical and epistemological layering, his music never feels heady. Stith is interested in “ineffable experiences,” not inaccessible ones, he says. “Artistically, I think I'm attracted to people who are strong enough to let apparent opposites sit next to one another, to co-mingle, to produce unexpected beauty.”

Stream DM Stith's Heavy Ghost via Asthmatic Kitty.