Danté Ravenhearst: Asphalt
Toronto-based folk artist Danté Ravenhearst's debuts with Asphalt, a haunting alternative folk rock number. With its somber lyrics bleeding between shimmering crashes and eerie, vibrating organ, Asphalt is an unconventional song of mourning, of anguish, of searching for a connection that once existed in a physical world that has since changed.
The recording of Asphalt in November 2023 was a labour of friendship between Ravenhearst and a group of close Toronto and Hamilton-based session musicians, Ben McWebb, Kurt Van Bendegem and Jonathan Horvath. A mutual love of the rawness of classic country and folk music production brought Ravenhearst and producer, Matt Fasullo creatively together. Fasullo's solo self-produced work occupies the atmospheric alternative indie folk rock space, pulling the traditional country folk elements of Asphalt into a fresh, contemporary context, a marriage of old and new.
"I am really entranced by the correlation of loss between our emotional and physical spaces and the mourning that comes with that," says Ravenhearst of the thread of environmental and emotional grief that flows through her music. Asphalt is about searching for a connection that existed in a world that physically no longer exists. Its question "Where are you? Where are you?" hauntingly chanted to the listener, is only asked and never answered.