Monk Parker’s Sad Clown

Monk Parker’s music exudes from some otherworldly plain, an elastic space of chiaroscuro sadness where brief glimpses of light fall only to cast shadow. Like his previous indie outfits, acclaimed NYC duo of Parker & Lily and subsequent rebound with the Low Lows, his solo efforts dwell in hollowed heartbreak and loneliness.

With his second solo offering, Crown of Sparrows, Parker continues exhuming recordings from his Austin convalescence several years ago when he returned to Texas to recover from illness. Like 2015’s How the Spark Loves the Tinder, the new six-song offering is mellow and melancholic, a bedside fever dream of want dissolving in a haunted well of echo and reverb.

“Gaudy Frame” lenses those same dreams, a peek through the looking glass at Parker’s apparition searching for substantiation. Written while on tour last year through Europe, the song lulls like a flickered vision that never fully materializes.

“It’s a very modern romance, this one,” offered Parker about the track. “Everybody’s wrapped up in their own little world, staring longingly across the various fences at everyone else. And at the same time, it’s standard country-music narrative No. 106, isn’t it? The Sad Clown.

“Last year, we toured Europe pretty much nonstop, and I kept seeing this one actress on the TV in hotel lobbies, or on posters along the high streets, just nagging at the edge of my consciousness,” he continues. “I’d meet girls that reminded me of her. A crush, really, that’s all, but she came to feel like the still center of our whirlwind of weird, chaotic activity. I’d look out for her likeness each day the way you’d watch the mailbox for a letter from home. She was comforting to me. My imaginary friend.

“So when we had a few days off later, I wrote this song for her in my friend Kamy’s farmhouse outside Toulouse, and we recorded it months later in Berlin on the last day of tour.”

The video, directed by photographer Jacqueline Badeaux and featuring the uncanny puppets of Austin artist Hannah Carter, simultaneously disturbs and compels. It’s a terrifying beauty as Parker sinks into his own effigy.

Check out the premiere of the video for “Gaudy Frame.” Parker, onetime leader of Austin jazz rockers the King Valentine Octet and now a local dweller once again, marks the release of Crown of Sparrows Friday, Sept. 29 at the Mohawk with Adam Torres and Thor & Friends.