10/12 Lipp- Dark Colour (because black is the darkest colour)

I don’t know if there is anything more human than the natural instinct to move to the music we love. Whatever type of music it may be, the passionate listener lets music take over the imagination, feeling the music and swaying along until the beat of the song matches the beat of your heart. Some call it dancing. I call it living free in the moment.

It’s the kind of freedom local electronic band Dark Colour strives to create for listeners. “I know you gotta dance, I know you gotta dance,” Randall Rigdon sings to the audience. “I think the only time I saw you dance was the time I could hold you all night,” he croons as guitarist Coleman Williams plays a psychedelic bridge that never fails to make me feel as if I am free falling, though I have never been skydiving. “And in this moment, it feels divine, or maybe I’m just high on your love tonight,” Rigdon sings as he jumps up and down. “Maybe I’m just high on your love tonight,” he repeats nearly five feet in the air, probably the highest I have ever seen him jump. “Maybe I’m just high on your love tonight!”

Like the song “Hold You” described, Dark Colour music is laced with many natural, yet surreal image. Natural because the lyrics portray the most humanizing emotions—such as love—yet surreal because they depict dreamlike feelings almost too good to be true. Rigdon’s idealist, romantic side bleeds through his confessional lyrics reminiscing romantic relationships that resemble Annie Hall or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

(Thankfully, Rigdon is not heartbroken. Most of the songs were written before I stole his heart almost one year ago.)

The natural and surreal rift is brought closer together through the instrumentation, with a sound made up of very artificial, computerized electronic elements balanced alongside very live, natural sounds. “Reach for the Night” is one of my favorite examples, with whizzing synths creating an ambient, space like layer over cow bells. Against a loop of himself chanting “who who who who who who who who” Rigdon sings “I don’t want to make this a secret.”

Rigdon says the mix is congruent with the message that finding a balance of life’s dichotomies—such as dreams versus reality, idealism versus realism and acceptance versus rejection—can ultimately be a channel to free love.

“Dark Colour’s ultimate message is about achieving freedom through connection, or more reductively, love,” Rigdon said.

Personally speaking Dark Colour is my greatest channel to free love. Each song I listen to takes me on a journey into the depths of the beautiful mind I fell in love with. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with him still peacefully sleeping in my arms and wonder what he is dreaming about, or wonder why exactly he just smiled when he looked at me. Yet I am able to discover it all when he walks out of the basement closet, fresh from recording his next creation on his Macbook.