Ten minute tea with Afternoon Tea. Spend ten minutes with Afternoon Tea. In the time it takes to boil one kettle, and let one cup of tea steep, we will have your daily art + music fix covered. Take your afternoon tea break with our Afternoon Tea curators.
Today’s tea + soundtrack + visuals curated by Action Forever.
Sim, the bandleader of Action Forever, grew up in Brantford, Ontario. His obsession with music began at age five and, for the next two decades, his natural talents were fostered by a musical family upbringing and constant exposure to a unique and eclectic mix of influences ranging from 80’s pop, to progressive rock, to jazz and indie.
He’d been working for years on a body of original fringe-pop music for a four-piece band, now to be released under the name Action Forever. The music, while lively, electric, melodic, and danceable, explores darker themes such as loneliness in a digital age, abusive relationships, loss of identity, and mental health.
“Loveless Love,” the latest single from the group, was written by Sim from the POV of a man suffering from online sex addiction and parasocial relations.
Stream + share the groovy “Loveless Love” now:
Loosely, the song tells the story of a man who is entranced by the world of live online sex, so much so that he gives up who he is: his morals, his dreams, his money, etc. for virtual transactional relationships with performers which he ultimately falls in “love” with. I want the listener to feel the tension of the main character’s struggle – the struggle of addiction.
Rooibos Tea. A couple of years ago during lockdown, I had a daily ritual where I would make a cup of rooibos tea, pick up my guitar, flick on an amplifier and sit alone to practice for a couple hours. The guitar I used was a big jazz box which sounded raw, warm, and earthy – coincidentally the same words I’d use to describe how rooibos tea tastes. Now, just the aroma of that tea vividly transports me back to those moments where I was deep in practice. Sense memory. Cool.
On the note of “raw, warm and earthy”, my song pick is Peter Gabriel’s Mercy Street from his 1986 album entitled So. It is one of my favorite pieces of music and the vocal harmonies are so beautiful and masterfully done, that they’ve been trapped in my head for about two decades. To me, the song sounds like “haunting surrender” – like someone turning towards a dark truth and facing it, whatever it may be. What really gets me about this song, is that every aspect of it – the lyrics, rhythm, the melodies, the vocal deliveries, the instrumentation – all work in perfect concert to reinforce such a peculiar and specific feeling. It’s not just a “sad” and “emotional” song, rather, it paints an incredibly clear picture of a complex emotionality – a very unique one at that. That and…I just love it.
I recently bought a book on the history of photography and opened it to the photo entitled Florence Owens Thompson taken by American photographer Dorothea Lange in 1936. It captures a poverty stricken mother, wearing a face of worry in a hopeless situation (the Great Depression), caught in an obvious struggle to raise her three young children. Lange was commissioned by the Farming Security Commision (FSA) to “humanize the consequences of the Great Depression”. Much like the song, the photo is masterfully staged in such a way to be very concise about what it’s trying to say. It is a real photo of a real mother and her children, but Lange supposedly did give direction to the subjects to ensure it brought out the right message – one of having mercy for those in their times of struggle.
Tea + Me 