Kyla Charter flattens space and time on "Qwyn"

Photo by Noelia Ruiz.

In the video for her new single “Qwyn” (premiering tonight on Long Winter TV), Kyla Charter thrusts past into present, stitching together clips of home videos recorded by her late grandfather. 

In one shot, the camera’s trained on a smiley toddler, bouncing at the knees and waving both hands with glee as they maneuver a young cedar in a sunny park.

“That’s me,” Charter tells Long Winter over the phone a week out from the video’s release.

As her grandfather’s camera follows her younger image, it pans left to show an older boy (a distant cousin, Charter assumes) doing the same thing — or perhaps it reveals the toddler has been mimicking the boy. But almost as quickly as he appears, the camera cuts and the boy is gone. The toddler, meanwhile, continues bouncing on her mark.

“The vibe we were trying to encapsulate — we called it ‘rhythm and doom.’ Kind of like R&B but more haunted.”

“My grandfather was not like a phenomenal videographer at the beginning, and these were like his first few videos,” Charter explains. “I think he panned away and then back really quickly or I don’t remember what happened, but there’s some kind of continuity thing that I thought would be best if I just cut out.”

While Charter’s editing choice was purely functional and the disappearing effect it produced is coincidental, it also provides a striking visual reflection of the groove that accompanies it and Kyla’s honeyed vocals — a thick, nearly stuttering beat that moves along a kind of inverted propulsion, erasing itself upon its own blunt punctuation, a dynamic Charter credits to her producers at Safe Spaceship, with Chino De Villa on drums, Ben MacDonald on keys, and Scott McCannell on bass.

“The vibe we were trying to encapsulate — we called it ‘rhythm and doom.’ Kind of like R&B but more haunted,” Charter explains. “Part of that aesthetic is playing with time and playing with sounds in non-traditional ways.”

Named after Charter’s sister, “Qwyn” is a song Charter began writing 10 years ago at a time when her family thought they might lose her sister but set aside when that risk lifted.

“I put it away, and in COVID times I’ve been living with her, her two kids, a husband and a dog. And she’s living a very traditional life, and it’s amazing. I’m like the weird creative younger sister who’s — I mean I’d been on the road for a number of years before the pandemic and it was great to just have time to be close to her and close to the family, but I moved out [of her place] in 2020 and it kind of brought up a whole bunch of feelings that felt very similar to those that I was trying to explore with that song, years ago,” Charter explains. The experience prompted her to revisit the song she started a decade ago, and the parallels were undeniable. “What it looks like to grow up, what it means to grow up, how death and mourning doesn’t necessarily have to be the end of something — it can also be a beautiful beginning. That’s what I was trying to honour in the song.”

The track is ostensibly about Charter’s sister, but it’s full of ghosts from Charter’s past. 

“The music was from a completely different song. I had written the main kind of melodic guitar part again like 10 years ago for this song called ‘Better’ about this boy that I had been in love with, and when we went back in the studio, we reimagined the production of it in general. And to just throw in this song about this boy that I really don’t care about anymore just felt so inauthentic, so one of the producers, Scott McCannell, was like, here, I’m just going to leave you with the session, you sit down, I’ll go for a walk, you do what you need to do and just see what comes out.”

She says following feelings from 10 years ago in today’s context was a deeply resonant process.

“I thought I was gonna write a song about my grandfather,” Charter continues. “He was a musician, he played guitar and was a huge part of the reason why my family is so musical, and he passed away a number of years ago as well, so I thought I was going to use this time to honour him. But what came out were the words that I had written about my sister, and it really is just a stream of consciousness. I started weeping because I realized that I had been holding all this kind of pain that I needed to release and not knowing why. Because moving out of somebody’s house and down the street is not a giant deal, but in processing what it is to really truly let go of someone in a very special way that you’ve been used to holding onto them, that was kind of what I was exploring recording it.”

In both the song and the video, Charter summons distorted representations of the past to better stabilize a present that feels increasingly elusive, establishing meaningful continuities in the process.

“Goodbye, goodbye,” Charter sings at the top of “Qwyn,” but it’s only the beginning.

[April 8 update: Kyla Charter’s “Qwyn” premiered on Long Winter TV on Jan. 27, 2022. You can watch the Jan. 27 episode of LWTV here, also featuring an interview with Charter. “Qwyn” is featured on Charter’s debut solo album Edible Flowers, out today!]