Taja le Fay

L’Rain is a great live band, I can attest. But the band’s albums are its own project; the latest, fata morgana, announces itself as a collaged sonic construction immediately through multiple textural shifts and interruptions in its gorgeous opening song, “with time.” A quick preamble, “rumors of light,” sets the scene with white noise and a spoken line, “I keep trying to start,” interrupted by silences, clicks of a machine shutting on or off, and throat clearing, until it fades out to make way for a simple piano figure and delicate vocal melody – only to be interrupted themselves less than two minutes later by a shift in mood and instrumentation, handing the piano figure off to a synth and displacing the singing voice with unintelligible speech. The melody returns... and is stopped mid-phrase a minute later. “It’s just not done yet,” says the muttering voice, audible now the other instruments have stopped. A tape rewinds. And the song picks up again, even more gorgeously atmospheric than before, through to its conclusion.

We’re only four minutes in the album at this point. If you’ve somehow missed its sonic shifts so far, the next track (again, beautifully simple figure, this time on what sounds like trombone, and Taja Cheek’s lush vocals holding long tones) is interrupted by a few sudden silences. What are these stops, not long enough to register as beats? They might mark the beginning and end of a looped line in the bass; but they also seem to cut through the entire track fifteen seconds in, stopping all its sounds for a moment, like your heart skipping. When the drums enter a minute later – first time for the album – they are far away, and are themselves interrupted or subsumed by the white noise, the trombone-like figure, the bass loop. And then: complete silence, for a full beat this time. The track starts again as if nothing had happened, drums more continuous now but still distant. Are they in the same room as the other instruments? Everything must be – we listeners included - but this room is not a performance space. It’s the space of the album and its sonic construction. This is a sculpted, multi-dimensional space where musicians and instruments interact as sounds rather than players.

This approach to recording isn’t new – it’s Brian Wilson’s Pet Sounds, George Martin’s Revolver, or Alan Parsons’ Dark Side of the Moon. L’Rain’s records are classic rock in this sense. Fata morgana might even be a headphones album, a stoner space we explore alongside its creators, alternately awed and giggling at the audacious jokes the sounds deliver in the studio.

Yet L’Rain is the furthest possible music from some retromania radio dream; Taja Creek’s songwriting draws on influences from across the dial. Still, to follow L’Rain’s hints of genre hopping – there’s even a dancehall bit at the end of “july 5th,” and dare I say I heard Quiet Storm on “birthday”? – is to fall into a listening habit that may not be useful for absorbing how this album was made or communicates. Its jumpcuts are not Zappa, or Zorn. Its stoner humor is not Beefheart, or Ween thank god. For all its fun and funny play with genre, I hear fata morgana – and L’Rain’s project as a whole – as emotional in a way those clever dudes never dared. This is very personal art made from pieces of sound, stitched and sculpted into a moving whole.

What is it moving us toward? “Not Jazz” is the tag L’Rain uses on Bandcamp – again, a good genre joke. But there’s a serious sting to that tag: don’t fall back on clichés or assumptions when you listen to this new music, even if you recognize bits of the old in its materials. This album is contemporary art. Sit with it, from start to finish, then start it again.

And don’t expect the same thing when you see the band live. That’s the illusion referred to in the title, for me. L’Rain may be a band, but fata morgana is a band on the hazy horizon, upside down and multiplied and stacked vertically to the sky.

Listening to: Lost Tape - 1980, by Abdou El Omari

Cooking: vegan lunch for friends