Bells Larsen - Blurring Time
Royal Mountain Records
Released on April 25th, 2025
Back in May 2024, I had the pleasure to attend the Land of Talk tour show at The Aviary, where I happened to stumble into Bells Larsen as an accompanying tour act. It was quite the bill with the only other act being the formidable Cassia Hardy. While Cass is well-known to me and Land of Talk had entered my orbit many a time, Bells Larsen was largely unknown to me. Soft spoken and with candid demeanour, Bells took the stage with what I’ve come to know now as some of the tracks featuring in his latest album Blurring Time (2025).
Along with his friend Georgia Harmer, Larsen sets out to facilitate a dialogue with himself across time punctuated by his gender transition and collapsed by a musical oscillation of temporalities. In 2022, Larsen recorded his previous “high” voice and instrumentations to which he returned to after his voice dropped through his hormone replacement therapy prescribed testosterone. Harmer was invited to make vocal arrangements for his new voice to evoke a harmony between his present and past self.
The opening title track states this theme overtly, reflecting on the simultaneity of being both things at once, sitting in the ambiguity and confrontations of otherness in oneself. This is followed by an absolute earworm, “415-514,” which reflects on missed amorous encounters, “the right person wrong time” given the depth of personal changes happening across time. Tracks like “Calme incertain” and “Questions” captivate the musical influence of artists like Adrienne Lenker and Sufjan Stevens in his songwriting. And among the tracks that stayed with me after watching Larsen live, “My Brother & Me” sends shivers down my spine with the soft instrumental and lyrical reflections of masculinity, seeing the crossroads over competing claims about what makes one a man while also intimating his rapport to his brother by making some mutual understanding. Raw, honest, and contemplative, this track stands out to me as a highlight of the album.
The artistic vision of this multilingual and vocal act of change and transformation characterizes Blurring Time as an album of self actualization through the radical vulnerability of facilitating this kind of self-dialogue — one which can sometimes be difficult for trans people to engage in depending on their own personal experiences.
I think it would be a disservice to Larsen if I were not to make a comment on the effect that transphobic U.S. legislation (on top of the transphobia sipping through Canada) had on his artistic practice. In April, Larsen and Halifax pop artist T. Thomason both announced their U.S. tour cancellations due to state-sanctioned discrimination. Larsen shared that he received an email from “the American Federation of Musicians stating that [he is] no longer able to apply for a visa because U.S. Immigration now only recognizes identification that corresponds with one's assigned sex at birth.”
I think this album is critical to engage with and celebrate along on its own right, but also in the context of the struggles of trans people today — unfortunately, even in industry conversations about touring I’ve attended, cis industry professionals haven’t given this much thought despite its ramifications. The work and struggles of trans artists shouldn’t be overlooked or downplayed, there are such incredible trans artists in Canada covering a wide range of sound: Cassia Hardy, Backxwash, Ada Rook, PLEASEBENiCE, Leith Ross, ElyOtto, and Devi McCallion just to name a few.
