on looking up
Exclusive: Iona the Stargazer
If you look at a traditional portrait of Urania, one of the nine Greek muses, she’s looking at the stars. Stretching her hands towards the heavens, as if in a motion to bind the two, to see if someone would reach out from the other side.
As I wrote about recently, the distance between ourselves and the unknown is intimidating. It’s not often that we feel the comfort, the strength to reach out as Urania did.
One night while drifting away, a sailor became lost at sea, the vengeful, unforgiving gods preventing any light from illuminating his path. It was only until he pleaded out to the muses, to Urania, that a single star pierced the skyline, bringing him home.
The music world’s latest sensation, Iona Bielby, had something similar to tell me: “Whenever you feel creatively stuck, you just have to look for the stars around you.”
Having hosted her Stargazer podcast and YouTube series for over a year now, Bielby is ready to build upon the innovative set and format she’s built – chatting with popular London musicians while laying in a homemade fort – and on to the stars themselves. The choosing to be still when everything around you insists on acceleration. The act of lying on your back, of letting your eyes adjust to darkness, of waiting for meteors that may or may not appear.
Stars simply don't care about your schedule, your deadlines, your five-year plan. They don’t care about the traditional music rollout, the not-so-guerilla campaigns that flood our streets. They exist without purpose. They burn bright, simply because that's what stars do.
At first glance, Stargazer is a welcoming space – “sweet and gentle”, as Bielby calls it. But inside the gentleness, the warmth, the serotonin-filled colors of her backdrop is holding much more than the weight of its two guests. There’s a “real distaste for modern day artist promo cycles” expressed through the show, Bielby claims, challenging everything traditional you may think about music journalism. You may pause a little too soon. You may leave lighter. You may even leave haunted.
The migration from fabric caves to celestial amphitheaters will change the frequency of everything. Out there, surrounded by light, by everything, by nothing, words will learn new gravities, new ways of falling toward meaning. As we know, the conversation can end as constellation–scattered points of brightness that only make sense from a distance.
The stardust won’t blind you. Reach out and try it yourself.