Heres the deal, The Good Music is being made. You lose because you don’t have a house to hear it and no, Spotify doesn’t cut it. You have to remove walls and go to the source, live. Thats where its at. We lose because Mappe Of has no house in Durham Region, oddly his home, unless I lose because I don’t know the house. Ya dig.
Has this Tom of Whitby who keens like that Thom of Yorke dipped beneath all radars, or flown over all radars or just mine. Were there nights in the Dungeon? Were there days on the beaches? Were there fireflies and firelight and Sunday afternoon Mall meet-ups? Where does it come from now the kids are not hung up on a hang out? Snapchat?
So I went to The Drake for Mappe Of’s debut show, an album release for “A Northern Star, A Perfect Stone, available on Paper Bag at your fave record shoppe.
Much is to be made of this young man Tom Meikle who is also more often known as Mappe Of. The olde English folk is very much part of the man, one could suppose him a suburban Nick Drake perhaps breathing the sparkling melodies on a lute for the assorted characters on the cover of A Trick of the Tail. But there’s more.
Mappe Of crosses generations and genres from Reign Ghost to Protest The Hero and Timber Timbre and like them would be familiar with the woods and winters around Whitby, the moody views. He would be familiar with the confining interiors of Canada, but he is also familiar with going long walkabout in red-eyed dry Australia. Down-Under would be where this Mappe Of begins to shape his prog-folk, his alt-airs, he takes them up and over into the ambiance of atmospheres but there’s more.
Mappe Of is ethereal as cloud nine sure, straining for the celestial but this Icarus has read the myth. One can soar from the cradle but the funereal pyre waits. Mappe Of sings with gravitas of one familiar with the unbearable lightness of being.
He also sings as one familiar with For Emma, but oh so Forever Ago and even one familiar with a Fleet Fox in Bedouin Dress. He sings like one who knows. Does he know? Is he still unfurling, destiny to be determined. Yes but no, there will be more.
Find a house, his house on wax, his house on wood and watch with the lights out, this man who knows. Who knew?