Linda Perhacs :: Parallelograms

Linda Perhacs sings as though time were a place where nature and voice keep brushing against one another.

Deep in the hidden archive of American music there are records that never quite belong to their own moment — obscured for years, as if the world had not yet grown the ears to hear them. Parallelograms, released on Kapp in 1970 amid the slow dissolution of the Californian dream, is one of them. It sold almost nothing; discouraged by the label's indifference, Linda Perhacs went back to her job as a dental hygienist in Beverly Hills, and the record vanished for four decades before collectors, reissues and the internet reassembled it into a lost classic.

But the rediscovery story — undiscovered genius, ahead of her time — is the least interesting thing about it, and it hides the actual key. Perhacs was never part of the Laurel Canyon world of Joni Mitchell or Crosby, Stills & Nash; she was working in a dental office when the film composer Leonard Rosenman, of Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden, heard her home tapes. What drew him was not a song but a drawing: Perhacs had made a graphic visualisation of a piece called "Parallelograms" — light, colour, form and sound at once — and offered to arrange it. The fact that explains this record is not that it anticipated anything. It is that Linda Perhacs has synaesthesia: she sees sound as free-form shapes and colours moving in space, and Parallelograms is her attempt to notate that — to make audible the way she genuinely perceives.

This reframes the whole album. Its landscapes are disorienting less by design than by accuracy — reverberation turning nature into a mental presence, harmonies evaporating, almost nothing fixed, because that is what sound looks like to her. "Chimacum Rain" sets the world at once: acoustic guitar braided with aqueous choirs and harmonic drifts out of a rural West Coast dream, its afterglow audible in Julia Holter, Joanna Newsom and much of today's pastoral psychedelia. "Dolphin" and "Call of the River" push the animism further — water, wind, animals and light are not poetic images but sonic entities, an ecological listening decades early.

The title track is where the synaesthesia becomes the form itself. It gives up lyrics for the syllables of geometric words — parallelograms and their kin — set spinning through echo, wordless voices and suspended electronic textures. Perhacs called it "a three-dimensional sound sculpture rather than a linear song," a thing of moving sound and colour and light; it stops behaving like a song and becomes a space you stand inside. And it owes nothing to the era's chemical psychedelia: Perhacs said plainly that drugs held no interest for her, that her expansion came from meditation, perception and close attention to the natural world. This is not a trip. It is a report.

That she came from outside the folk idiom is not a footnote but the cause. With no scene to imitate and no received grammar to honour, Perhacs had to invent a notation for a perception nobody else had — which is why the record sits in no genre and answers to no year. "Hey, Who Really Cares?", arranged with the jazz composer Oliver Nelson, is the most conventional thing here, and even it carries that cosmic lightness, like a broadcast from a station in another dimension. By "Moons and Cattails" and "Morning Colors" the folk has almost wholly dissolved into atmosphere — the ground on which Devendra Banhart and the whole New Weird America would later stand.

The record never imposes itself. It stays at the edges, a distant sound moving through the trees — which is, in the end, exactly what it was built to be: not a song about a landscape, but the sound of one mind's landscape, drawn in air.