Half Shadow

For the past decade Half Shadow, the songwriting moniker of Portland’s Jesse Carsten, has been unfurling an enigmatic, windswept music: equal parts earthen folk and cosmic rock and roll, with a primal pop experimentalism seeping from the edges. Half Shadow’s performances are recognized as dazzling, immersive events, inspiring a passionate following in the Northwest. The Portland Mercury has praised Carsten’s shows as “invariably powerful, full of wonder, and unlike anything else." Carsten birthed the first fully fledged Half Shadow LP in 2019, Dream Weather Its Electric Song, which was hailed as “a carefully thought-out work…of poetic devotionals to the natural world, the subconscious, other realms.” In 2022 arrived At Home With My Candles, an album of mythopoetic paeans to the domestic uncanny, the mysterious and unseen worlds experienced at home. Expanding the project’s intimacy into something more sonically encompassing, Carsten composed folk song epics, lo-fi dirges, and primal pop experiments joining the domestic and the cosmic, the ordinary and the surreal. Having been called “one of Portland’s best kept secrets,” it is paradoxically Half Shadow’s mystery-inspired, DIY ethos that spirits Carsten’s ever-evolving project out of the home-recordist’s cave and onto more illuminated stages. When it does, Half Shadow is ready to wrap listeners in the dark, sparkling hues and mossy undergrowth that have become the poetic trademark of this singular undertaking.