FEATURE:
Revisiting…
Amber Mark – Three Dimensions Deep
__________
EVEN though…
the album was released back in January, I wanted to revisit the extraordinary debut album from Tennessee-born artist Amber Mark. Three Dimensions Deep is one of the best albums of the year and, even though some were mixed towards it, it received a lot of love and applause. Quite right, as it is a stunning album from an artist that many should keep an eye out for. I feel some might have let Three Dimensions Deep slip by them, as it did come out at the start of the year. Maybe there was not quite the attention aimed the way of great new albums as there should have been. If you have not heard Mark’s amazing debut, then spend some time today to get to the bottom of a sensational music from an artist who I feel will continue to grow and build in terms of her talent, acclaim, and success. Before getting to a couple of reviews for the amazing Three Dimensions Deep, there are a couple of interviews and features that provide background and depth about Amber Mark. DIY interviewed her back in November of last year. I have selected some sections from that piece. Reading it, you can tell how intelligent, passionate, and soulful and open-minded the amazing Amber Mark is:
“For Amber, knowing that the universe is expanding brings comfort, rather than concern. “The existence of quantum and theoretical physics is freeing,” she begins. “It gives evidence to the belief that there is something bigger than us out there.” This isn’t a particularly deep and meaningful conversation for her – far from it. These considerations swirl at the front of her mind daily, making their way into dinner chats with friends and populating her YouTube search history. “I don’t understand everything – it can be hard to wrap your head around all the concepts, like higher dimensions, wormholes, and all the math involved,” she continues, “but what’s cool is that I can try to implement these theories in a way that actually relates to my life. A lot of it actually tries to reference and borrow from real theory. The science and the fiction go hand in hand.”
Raised by a deeply spiritual German mother, whose wayfaring studies took them from India to Nepal to Berlin, Amber lived at a Tibetan monastery in Northern India for a notable period. “We did these ‘compassion meditations’ using mala prayer beads. I would repeat the same mantra – ‘For the love of the passion’ – over and over,” she recalls. Then came an unexpected awakening that would stay with her for life. “I saw the monks do these week-long retreats in the name of compassion. Then I’d see them turn around and kick the street dogs in the area like it was nothing to them.” The casual bloodlust was harrowing. “It came to a point where I couldn’t watch Animal Planet. Seeing people and animals attacking each other became traumatic for me, and still is.”
Chilling as it was, the experience had a sobering effect on Amber’s spiritual education. “In a way, it humanised the monks in my eyes. When people get power, it’s hard for them not to abuse it.” She saw this very human truth of corruptive power manifest in other ways, too. “When some monks and lamas became popular with Westerners, it could get really culty. I saw the darker aspects of religion that flow from following figureheads,” she continues. However, Amber found a way to still draw lessons to take into her adult life. “I separate those experiences from the beautiful, spiritual sides of religion, which I still love and appreciate. Today I still tap into the Tibetan Buddhist meditations I learned how to do as a kid,” she says.
PHOTO CREDIT: Eva Pentel
She’s disarmingly casual about these memories, which are intense to hear about, even as an observer. It’s clear that the singer has lived her whole life watching and learning, and this comes through in her artistry. Known for its genre-defying versatility and brimming with intelligence, her music is a mirror ball, reflecting her influences with sensitivity and sharpness.
“My favourite show of all time is Avatar: The Last Airbender,” she gushes of one much-loved stimulus. “No matter what I’m doing, it’s always an inspiration to me.” Natively versed in fandom and sci-fi, she cites Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as one of her favourite books, and even samples the infamous ‘42’ scene from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life on album track ‘On & On’. “We’re having trouble getting it cleared!” Amber moans, “I’m fighting so hard for it!”
The storytelling tradition of comic books and the sci-fi canon are important to her. “It’s why I take music videos so seriously. We’re lucky to be able to tell the story of a song through that additional level, and I try to draw from my knowledge base and pay tribute to what I love with my visuals,” she enthuses. “The glowing eyes in the ‘Worth It’ music video are an homage to Avatar, a way to include myself in that universe.” One could say that going to lengths to reference these influences in her music videos is an elaborate form of cosplay. She laughs in agreement: “And let’s not forget, expensive!”
An ode to the higher planes and cosmic orders at the centre of her lifelong fascination, even ‘Three Dimensions Deep’’s title is supremely aligned with this way of thinking. It will be her debut album, despite releasing music and earning industry recognition for over four years. A rich and fully realised body of work, the album took on its existential thesis from scribbles on the back of a crumpled brown paper bag on which Amber had scrawled a nebulous map of ideas and concepts. The central theme? “Figuring out what is going on!”
Although it was never the plan to wait so long for its release, Amber has continued to hone her craft and consistently put out interesting and intentional music in the interim. Her debut 2017 project ‘3:33am’ was a complex and thoughtful love letter written in memory of her late mother. ‘Conexão’ was her lustrous, romantic follow-up that called upon soul and bossa nova styles. Over the pandemic period, she charted an unpredictable course of releases ranging from dance, house and stripped down tracks to compelling personal takes on Nirvana’s ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ and, unexpectedly, Sisqo’s ‘Thong Song’.
PHOTO CREDIT: Eva Pentel
Lead single ‘What It Is’ is very much the thesis of the album. Despite the glitzy, careening pulse of the track, it calls out for a sign, an answer to that central question and the climax of each chorus: what is the point of it all? “That question has always been building inside of me,” she ponders aloud. “Then it just flowered to a whole new level last year.” In the depths of last summer’s political upheaval, sparked by the murder of George Floyd, Amber looked first to society’s institutions for optimism and the promise of change. Instead, she found corruption and smokescreen theatrics at every turn. Her vision was pulled into full, sharp focus. “Here in New York City, I walked out the door every day and just saw suffering everywhere,” she explains. “I thought of the animal kingdom and the way suffering plays out there in its most basic state. Animals kill, consume and sacrifice each other to survive. That balance between life and death is such a trippy question. I don’t know if I’ll ever find an answer.”
Tackling the heady world of physics and the cosmos has, however, had the very human outcome of making Amber feel closer to her mother. Those same notions of wavelengths, energetic fields and higher dimensions espoused by her mother - a devout student of Tibetan Buddhism and “total hippie” - found their way back to Amber through the scientific studies she was turning to: “she was talking about the same things, just in a different way.”
Amber Mark reintroduces herself with purpose and clarity on ‘Three Dimensions Deep’. The album charts a young woman’s journey through self-discovery and waywardness, spirituality and existentialism, and at the end of it all, her way back to the lessons her mother taught her. “I’ve been seeing my mom in my meditations lately,” she smiles. “She’ll be sitting underneath a tree in the middle of space.”
One thing’s for sure – no matter where Amber’s journey takes her, she’ll never be lost”.
I have been listening to Three Dimensions Deep since it came out. Amber Mark is someone you need to follow on Twitter and keep abreast of all her progress. She is a wonderful artist whose debut album has stayed with me all year. This NBHAP interview caught up with the N.Y.C.-based artist and told how new-found spirituality runs through her impressive and somewhat underrated debut album:
“Three Dimensions Deep also goes beyond musical expressions of the artist. Each music video transports you into a different world. In the process of making the visualizers, Amber Mark tells me, she has been heavily influenced by her love for science fiction movies and series. Across the board, she leaves little traces for the viewers to piece together. In all the videos for example, light is a prevailing theme. Whether it is as a complete dissolve into light, like on Bliss or the beginning of the light within on Foreign Things, the artist seems to have a special meaning attached to it.
“I turned to sci-fi movies and series from when I was younger for inspiration. One show I used to watch is Avatar the Last Air Bender”. She grins as she tells me about the universe created in the series, one in which the elements are manipulatable. “I was obsessed with that show, and I wanted to live in that universe. It also uses a lot of symbols from different Asian spirituality, which was something that I felt really connected to because of my mother.”
Light Beings
Her mother, a Tibetan Buddhist (even though she was actually German) introduced Amber Mark to a way of spiritual thinking that still influences her until today. “When I was a child, my mother would always try to get me to meditate”, Amber says. And the attempts to calm youthful hyperactivity worked with a few tricks applied. “She used to tell me to just not think about anything. Which did not work for me at all”, the artist laughs.
“But then she came up with a little visualization that helped. I would imagine myself sitting on the world with my legs crossed – on top of the entire planet, like a very large being. And a nectar of light would be beaming into my third eye, filling me up and turning me into a light being. Like that I really learned to focus and to keep my mind still.”
The visualization of herself as light being, stayed with the artist. For Three Dimensions Deep, she enacted parts of the meditative practice and turned them into stunning visuals to her songs.
PHOTO CREDIT: Nelson Huang
Without, Withheld, Within
The story of the music videos unfolds alongside the journey of the record. But Amber did not release the videos in order, she admits cheekily. To keep her listeners on the edge of the seat, the chronology is in disorder. The transformation of the artist into a light being is not yet completed, we are still missing some pieces of the puzzle. Later, there will be a compilation of the videos released as a short film, Amber gives away.
“The record is me trying to go through a journey within myself”, and the videos externalize that journey into stunning visuals. Foreign Things is where the journey begins, where the first beams of light, the traces of spirituality shine through. It ends on Bliss, on which the artist turns into a full light being eventually dissolving into dust.
Third Dimension
Another prevalent motive across the videos is the cube. Even on the visualizers to songs without a music video, the artist moves in a rotating cube set against a rich blue backdrop. “I wanted to call the record Three Dimensions Deep. And when I thought of that, the three dimensions, a cube shape is the first thing that came to my mind. So, I wanted to play with that.”
The number three plays a big role in the artists life. Tied to her family, that for the longest time consisted of the three of them; her, her mother, and her brother. The number is also part of the debut EP, 3.33. “When I first started making music, I was embarrassed about recording and did not want anyone to hear. I was also working a day job, so I would always make beats and write at night. There was a span of two weeks during which I would always look at the clock at exactly 3.33am. And more threes started popping up around me after the death of my mother, which was also on the 3rd of June. I wanted to keep that theme on my debut record as well.”
Beyond Perception
Aside of the number three, which plays a big role in Amber’s private life, the number also bears a lot of meaning in the spiritual realm. The boundaries of human perception and the role of spirituality also influenced Amber in the creation process of the record. “I started to do a lot of research on theories on higher dimension and on how we perceive our reality. In three dimensions – Three Dimensions Deep – is how we view the world. Psychologically and philosophically, we are only able to understand three dimensions.”
Amber tells me about the theories she has been deep diving into over the pandemic years. “It is so interesting, there is the math for it, that higher dimensions exist. We know that they exist, but we cannot visualize them.” is that then the boundary of our perception is what Amber Mark asked herself. “That lead me to thinking about how we always talk about love, the soul, and consciousness, which essentially are also things we cannot grasp visually. But we still know that they are there somehow. Maybe they are things we could perceive in a higher dimension. I started playing around with ideas around that”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Nelson Huang
I am going to wrap things up with a couple of the (many) positive reviews for Amber Mark’s Three Dimensions Deep. This is what Pitchfork felt when they sat down with such a personal, powerful, and amazing album:
“Over the past six years, Amber Mark has crafted consistent pop-R&B music with tasteful, glossy precision. The New York artist’s first two EPs, 2017’s 3:33 AM and 2018’s breakthrough Conexão, examined themes of grief and love through lithe R&B, pop, dance, and bossa nova, melding different sounds into one elegant, rhythmic blend. She separated herself from her peers by leaning into stormy, overwhelming emotion, whether swimming through a monsoon of tears on an undulating ballad or demanding equal footing in a relationship over a jubilant house beat.
Mark’s impressive, husky voice suits her genre-hopping music, which hit a stride in 2020 on her quarantine-made covers series that allowed her to stretch her legs and experiment, especially in its more offbeat, cheeky exercises (see: her house-infused, unexpectedly delightful spin on Sisqó’s “Thong Song”). That set serves as a playful aperitif for Three Dimensions Deep, Mark’s polished, long-awaited debut. Moving smoothly between R&B, funk, and pop, the fully realized album foregrounds Mark’s vocals and songwriting, scrutinizing her self-doubt as a way to cast it out and build self-confidence.
The album is structured in three acts mapping Mark’s journey at different stages: identifying her own insecurities, working through the messy parts of self-discovery, and finally reaching a solid sense of self-worth. Three Dimensions Deep’s secondary, figurative throughline is inspired by Mark’s love of sci-fi and interest in heady astrophysics theories, a theme that pops up through celestial metaphors in her lyrics that amplify human concerns to galactic size. In Mark’s world, romance hurtles her to another planet, kisses are astronomical, and searching for her place in the world is posed as an all-consuming, cosmic question.
Mark makes the concept work, using it as a loose framework for plush, tightly produced songs whose subjects range from tossing men in the trash to battling dark nights of the soul. “Trying to see where life leads, where the future lies/Anxiety all of me keeping me up at night,” she admits on “One” over a chopped-up blues sample and knocking beats. The concession feels honest, with Mark taking stock of the uncertainty of her future and emerging freshly determined to take control of it. “On & On” describes another battle with self-doubt over a stomping drumbeat and sumptuous strings, making the mental slump of questioning one’s worth sound refreshingly comforting. She uses the occasional astral image, like looking up into the night sky, to illuminate small junctures of uncertainty and distance.
Mark tempers the album’s vulnerable moments with upbeat songs that traipse through sultry nights out and scenes from her love life. Early highlight “Most Men” unspools slowly, as organ chords give way to a laidback beat at the halfway point and Mark immortalizes the one true commandment when it comes to dating: “Most men are garbage.” Later, she moves on from terrible exes on the seductive “Softly,” which loops the guitar melody from Craig David’s 2000 song “Rendezvous” into a throbbing R&B backdrop for the heated tension she feels with a potential partner. Mark co-produced or engineered over half of the album’s 17 tracks and makes her fingerprints known, shifting easily from velvety, percussive R&B (“Worth It”) to sleek pop-funk (“Darkside”). Small details—a slight key change, stacked murmured vocals, luxuriant extended outros—work like choice accessories on Mark’s signature, memorable style.
As on her previous EPs, Mark’s dynamic voice imbues the album with its most emotive, surprising turns. On the sauntering “What It Is,” she stretches her vowels over cascading, layered vocals and a scorching guitar solo. Later she adopts a conversational flow to indulge in a glitzy lifestyle on “Foreign Things,” and strikes a smoky, melancholy tone during “On & On.” The depth and dexterity make for one of the album’s most engaging qualities; even when Mark reaches for an obvious lyric, as on the arguably outdated chorus of “FOMO” or the neutral-to-a-fault “Competition,” her rich, varied performance transforms the occasional errant choice into an opportunity for another compelling vocal phrasing.
Energetic, lush, and measured, Three Dimensions Deep is a cohesive debut from Mark that doesn’t lose sight of the bespoke sound that she’s developed over the years. Here, Mark’s music accomplishes its goal of making the pursuit of figuring out who you are, what you stand for, and how you can make it through the world feel as immense as a meteor cratering into the moon. But that kind of outsize passion feels exceptionally true to life, especially as rendered in Mark’s capable hands”.
The final review is from a British source, The Line of Best Fit. Perhaps not as known and played as widely and fondly as she is in her native U.S., there are sites and sources in the U.K. who are tuning into Amber Mark’s music. I have heard a few songs from Three Dimensions Deep played on the radio - though I hope 2023 is a year when her music is promulgated and augmented across U.K. stations and media:
“Almost four years after the release of her second EP Conexão, where singer-songwriter Mark established her favoured form of therapy – creative flow — she's delivering a concept album of self-discovery. Divided into three segments: Part 1: Without, Part 2: Withheld and Part 3: Within — each explores Mark’s journey through insecurity; forced confidence; and finding her place within the world, respectively.
Album opener “One” is a juxtaposition in it’s finest form. Lyrics that form the story of Amber Mark’s imposter syndrome and career anxiety are contrasted with an earworm of ridiculously rhythmic basslines, glints of sparkly synths and triumphant horn section choruses. A song dedicated to her late mother, Mark’s poignant lyricism has the ability to send shivers to anyone, as she sings “And I don’t know if I’ll ever succeed / I just want you proud of me up above”.
Moving through her mixed emotions, Mark captures the feelings of forced confidence in “Bubbles”, as she searches for escapism through trashy nights out to numb the pain of heartbreak. Laid back R&B fits the bill, as syncopated pulsations are at the core of the track, sensationally partnered with Mark’s rich contralo hums to create a sound that is ready made for the exact environment she sings about. And just like a concept album should, she seems to replicate this kind of night out in the near future, with a cooler head. “FOMO” is a neo-soul wonderland that sees Amber Mark truly release herself from anxieties that have been holding her back, as she chants “Won’t miss out on living / I believe it’s about time / I’m gon’ lose control / No time for FOMO”.
Part three of the album presents itself through the bittersweet dimension of “On & On”. Mark reveals her confusion of the world around her, as she questions “I’ve never been so confused / My confidence won’t come through” between fragments of iridescent keys and elegant strings. In contrast, her musical versatility shines through in “Darkside”, as she goes from R&B and soul to a track that delves into her exploration of astronomy with a sound that mimics essences of Phil Collins and Prince.
With stand out soulful single “Worth It” joining in the latter part of the album, it becomes even more delicate. Mark sumptuously unpacks how we are all our own worst enemy through self-destruction which is transformed into a message of self-love and a personal mantra to herself, as she hooks “You think you don’t deserve it / But you are so damn worth it”.
Three Dimensions Deep is an album that has helped Amber Mark to recover and find peace within herself. Yet somehow, it has potential to lend itself to anyone’s personal challenges, defining Mark as a force to be reckoned with”.
I was keen to promote Amber Mark’s Three Dimensions Deep, as it is one of the best debut albums of 2022. Such an incredible songwriter, producer and artist, Mark is someone who will go very far. An album that affected and moved me when I first hard it, I have been a fan of hers ever since. I guarantee you, when you listen to it, you will become a fan of the…
MESMERIC Amber Mark.