Paul Shapera makes pulp operas: Strange and oddly moving stories told through strange and oddly moving music. Just as pulp fiction covered everything from hard-boiled detective stories to Flash Gordon and Tarzan, Paul’s albums are fantasy musicals that cover a 180-year span of history in the fictional city of New Albion and whose musical genres can shift depending on where in the timeline the story is taking place. These imaginative tales are full of morally ambiguous characters, high drama, intricate world building, and soaring melodies.
His work is very much like an epic science fiction book series, but told through highly emotive music, like an opera cycle or old radio plays made with various forms of popular music. His new album, Jill’s Psychedelic Sunday, takes the psychedelic genre and blends it with different genres, from 60’s psych folk to Floyd, 90s rave to jam bands, and creepy tech to Space Rock.
Jill’s Psychedelic Sunday explores a range of psychedelic styles, changing according to Jill’s journey. It plays with classic 60s psychedelia, 90s rave, Floydian, jam inspired and more as Jill, during her final initiation into witch-hood, visits different scenes from her future. She hops through the minds of patients in asylum, runs through mirrors from spot to spot attempting to sew a wound in reality, discusses royal intrigue while falling through a felt planet in a jewelry box, tries to steal from a neuro-dome of psychic babies, and more.
“This album more than any other in recent memory was made because it was the album I wanted to listen to,” shares Paul. “Other albums are the story I want to tell right then, or the music that I feel I need to express, or the style I most want to explore. This one was the one I just simply wanted to listen to.”
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