After a seven-year hiatus in Tibet, India, and Colorado, Laura Goetz, AKA Golden Ghost, has returned to listeners with the second installment of her new work, The Big Sleep, releasing today, August, 16th by Epifo Music.

The Big Sleep: Future is Golden Ghost’s fifth full-length album, a dreamy and haunting epic and fourth chapter in chronicling the journey of the character named Little Rabbit across lifetimes and universes.

The narrative is invigorated by Goetz’s distinctive fingerstyle guitar, ethereal synths, and dynamic, unguarded vocals in a home recording of symphonic proportion. This sonically delicate, but resilient album finds Little Rabbit cast down from glory to forgetfulness, awaking to a distant post-Earth future of the long-lived and disembodied.

There she joins up with Killer Whale on a mission to tread the void where past and future collide and slip through the cycles of time, a voyage culminating in a pilgrimage to their own faded earthly monuments.

Goetz is a former member of Castanets and long-time collaborator with Viking Moses. In 2006 she moved to New York City, becoming a founding resident of the Silent Barn art space. Previous Golden Ghost recordings have included collaborations with John McCauley and Chris Ryan (Deer Tick), G. Lucas Crane (Nonhorse, Woods), Joanne Schornikow (The Shivers, Phosphorescent), Spencer Kingman (Spenking, The Dirty Projectors, Viking Moses), Ceylan Hay (Bell Lungs), George Thomas (Insect Heroes), and David Garland.

Golden Ghost has toured extensively in North America and Europe, and will return to the road in support of The Big Sleep: Future.

Laura Goetz kindly provided a detailed and insightful track-by-track rundown of her new album:

“Two Universes”
“Little Rabbit wakes to a strange future to which context is given by Killer Whale. She catches faint glimpses of an exalted past and struggles to grasp the present, still sensing the shared mission, which here becomes to breaking the cycles found within one unbroken life unbounded by space. She catches shards of memories and reels as they expand.”

“Immortal”
“Here continues Little Rabbit’s reflections on an emerging life that won’t end but will cycle, crumble, and remake itself just the same. She reflects on the happenings of the third chapter: how monuments were built and how she came to be forgotten to herself and everyone else.”

“Killer Whale’s Dream”
“Killer Whale recounts a dream to Little Rabbit, highlighting their connection and mutual journey over endless time, and their goal of passing beyond. Little Rabbit expresses doubts, as her state is rather fallen and sorry at the moment.”

“Precipice”
“Little Rabbit describes the view from the edge, never ready or knowing how to breach it. This song touches on core experiential themes of the album such as liminality, paradox, and nonconceptuality.”

“Fata Morgana”
“Little Rabbit, isolated from her friend, remembers their connection and waits helplessly for his return. Like a mirage in the distance, everything is uncertain—what is and what was ever real. Memory is likened to a cannibalistic monster in hiding. Core experiential themes of this album are repeated here—liminality in particular.”

“Dying to the World Again”
“Little Rabbit gives into the grief of loss, her mind going blank and disconnected. Dying to the world, she for a moment transcends into a poetic dimension, feeling as if she may never return.”

“After the Anthropocene”
“Little Rabbit’s current story is elaborated upon, her isolation becoming a power, just as these future beings live through screens and stories rather than flesh and blood forms. The trickster finds power in liminal space and in subverting the power of emotion—the madness of finding the way only to emerge again at the beginning.”

“Ash Planet”
“Little Rabbit is reunited with Killer Whale, and they take a pilgrimage to her home planet to view the ancient monuments, their stories now forgotten. They play among vague memories that pull them down like stones in the water where they catch their reflections, and find bliss in the moment where past and future ripple away.”

“No Roses”
“Little Rabbit once again reflects on the void from her precipice. Seeing nothing, there is a way forward. She longs to purify, to disappear, to get to the bottomless bottom where prophecies have long faded.”

“Little Rabbit No. 3”
“Little Rabbit wakes to a different life. Repeating a familiar story her memories are largely swept behind her for simple delights and fears—a patch of strawberries, a hunter in the brush. She settles into their familiar warmth and sleeps soundly, oblivious to the past and future following like shadows.”

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