Mikel Rafael puts this all to the test with his debut EP, "The Eternal Hour." This project uses classic literature, mythology, and raw emotional truth to craft a sound that sounds both ancient and disconcertingly modern.
From the first notes of the three-song collection, it’s obvious this isn’t your average debut. Drawing deeply on the well of Celtic tradition and recalling the ghostly beauty of disparate artists like Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen, and Jeff Buckley, Rafael creates a world that is once hushed, haunting, and saturated in poetic melancholy. Each chord sounds deliberate. Every lyric lived in.
The EP’s arrangement is deceptively basic morning, noon, and night, yet she peels back a different layer of human experience on each song. Inspired by a William Blake line that the infinite lies in an instant, Rafael taps into the same paradox in his storytelling. At its core is a wanderer who hears a spectral song in the woods and tracks it to a legendary stream, an allegory for something more essential.
The stripped-down sound of its instrumentation only underscores the journey’s heft even more. Acoustic guitars pulse like footsteps through fog, and vocal harmonies come in like echoes bouncing off canyon walls. It’s minimalist but never spartan. "The Eternal Hour" actually lives through whispered tension and emotional weight.
Born Michelangelo Macrohon, Rafael’s story is as colorful and complex as his music. He bounced around between the cluttered exuberance of Houston and the neon-soaked solitude of Hong Kong before landing on California’s rugged coast. That betwixt-and-between upbringing appears to grant him an intuition about contrast.
The music is complemented by a trio of narrative videos set in the moody wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, directed by Shane Weisman and shot by James Glasgow. Rafael himself is the star, a lonely searcher drifting through mist and woodland, pursuing shadows. It’s an extension of the myth. In "The Eternal Hour," Mikel Rafael gives us a portal to another world where time is suspended, mourning is beauty, and every silence has a code.
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