So many things to learn, so many to unlearn
To be in company and to be alone
So many things I thought I cannot live without
Now are disappearing, now are dissolving like clouds
Boris Kaplunovich has spent much of his life moving between places that might reasonably be called home. Born in Belarus, raised in Israel, and now based in Berlin, the musician from Totenwald and Day Clinic approaches his new solo project with the accumulated perspective of someone accustomed to departures, reinvention, and the strange persistence of attachment. Tall Grass, his latest single, turns those experiences toward something intimate: the possibility that certain people find one another despite geography, history, and timing conspiring against them.
Released July 25th as the first single from an EP expected this autumn, Tall Grass began with Kaplunovich lying in an unruly patch of grass in the middle of a city park. The setting provides central tension: a pocket of accidental wilderness surrounded by streets, buildings, appointments, and all the machinery by which urban life keeps time. Kaplunovich considers love from a similar position, contemplating encounters that seem improbable until, in retrospect, they acquire the peculiar logic of inevitability.
The lyrics move between learning and unlearning, solitude and companionship, loss and recurrence. Possessions and old certainties dissolve, while affection survives through smaller gestures: sharing rain, lying together in tall grass, accepting mistakes that may return. At its center sits the consoling thought that two lives might repeatedly find each other, regardless of when history happened to place them on the earth.
An acoustic guitar establishes the song’s modest frame before the arrangement gradually opens around it. Electronic tones enter with care, and the post-punk influence comes through in the use of space, repetition, and an occasional chill in the instrumentation. Kaplunovich sings with the plainspoken intimacy of a musician who understands how much weight understatement can carry. His phrasing leaves room around individual words, giving the performance the feeling of thoughts still taking shape as they are spoken.
Gratitude runs through Tall Grass, complicated by an awareness that permanence is largely wishful thinking. People meet, circumstances change, cities absorb their inhabitants, and affection becomes inseparable from the knowledge that every shared moment belongs to a finite sequence. Kaplunovich finds tenderness within that recognition without turning it into easy consolation.
Robert Hanna’s black-and-white video places Kaplunovich among neglected corners of the city: empty lots, worn concrete, industrial remnants, and abandoned spaces whose original purposes have become difficult to determine. He carries his guitar through these locations as a solitary troubadour, while Hanna finds striking geometry in broken walls, open ground, and severe urban surfaces. The photography gives Kaplunovich’s isolation a cinematic scale while preserving the song’s close, personal character.
Watch the video for Tall Grass below:
Following last October’s debut single, Be Them All, and years spent sharing stages with artists including Micah P. Hinson and Matt Elliott, Tall Grass brings Kaplunovich’s solo direction into sharper focus. His subject is belonging, understood here as a temporary alignment of people, place, and time. For a few minutes, lying together in the grass is enough.
Listen to Tall Grass below and order the single here.
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The post “Dissolving Like Clouds” — Berlin-based Post-Punk Artist Boris Kaplunovich Shares Video for “Tall Grass” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
