L'Rain :: fata morgana

Somewhere in the credits for fata morgana is a job usually left invisible: “album sequence by Yuka Honda.” On this record, sequencing is close to composition. Songs appear, get interrupted, shrink to thirty-seven seconds, return wearing somebody else’s clothes.

Thirteen tracks take thirty-nine and a half minutes. Six last less than three. Three barely clear a minute. The small pieces matter because Taja Cheek does not use them as corridors between the “real” songs. “rumors of light” opens while still sounding half-connected to something outside the record; “bedroom songs” gives a guitar figure just enough time to acquire a shape and then removes it; “no body / know body” lasts thirty-seven seconds. Yuka Honda, who sequenced the album and also contributed production to “bedroom songs” and “i remember,” seems an unusually significant name in the credits.

Cheek has described her lyric-writing in similar terms. Words frequently begin as syllables and noises sung against a melody; language arrives gradually through repetition. She has said that meaning comes slowly into focus. Listening to fata morgana, you can hear the delay. Its lyrics often feel as though they have caught a train already moving. A phrase repeats for the shape it makes in the mouth before we have entirely understood what it is accusing, wanting, or remembering.

“With time,” piano, modular synthesizer, samples and Timothy Angulo’s percussion keep refusing the obvious downbeat, while Cheek’s voice hangs a fraction above everything else; the strangeness is positional. This is where the album’s first real perceptual anomaly happens to me: for a few seconds I hear something of Richard Ellis and Sheila Brown Ellis’s Annabel (lee) coming through. Not enough to call it an influence, enough to send me back to the credits for a second look.

“blue” is more congested, and seems to want it that way: tenor saxophone, Ryan Easter’s trumpet, talking drum, bells, tambourine. Yet the result flaunts neither the arrangement nor the number of people inside it. Instruments and voice arrive from further back in the mix, caught in a tail of reverb that blurs where they are coming from.

Then “july 5th” breaks the contract.

A guitar figure spends much of the song making patience seem reasonable. There is something stranger in its shape: the instrument is plucked and rhythmically organised in a way that, for a moment, suggests a provenance that refuses to settle. The geography mishears itself. Cheek sings about food, work, policing, small commercial humiliations, and suddenly Screechy Dan comes in over a dancehall rhythm. It could have been the album’s neat little stylistic trick. It is something much better.

“borderline” begins with a guitar that already sounds slightly improper: a loop built from a progression left halfway through. The voice, meanwhile, continues to behave almost politely. Then the percussion begins to push the song sideways until the final minute sounds as though it is chewing through its own arrangement.

“elmyra,” at first, has the ease of expensive seventies soul seen on a television whose colours have been set a little too soft. The title comes partly from Elmyra Duff, the Tiny Toon Adventures child whose love for animals is violent enough to turn affection into another form of damage. Cheek connects her to the problem of loving too much; even the image of teeth can mean a smile, fear, or flesh being torn.

Underneath, the drums have a dry jazz gait and, instead of claiming the centre, act as a foundation for the voice. After a while the genre names begin to feel less useful. R&B, soul, jazz and electronica remain separately recognisable, but when Cheek brings them together they produce an object none of those names contains particularly well.

Then somebody drops a metal record on top of it.

“soulless cycle” began with a three-chord idea Cheek had written years earlier and forgotten. Rediscovering it, she heard the possibility of punk and of reproducing some of the physical pressure of L’Rain live. The guitars arrive compressed almost beyond usefulness, the drums hammer underneath, and Cheek keeps singing with the peculiar calm of someone whose machinery has caught fire but who still intends to finish the shift. Calling it the album’s “rock song” is not much use. Its function is damage. After seven tracks of carefully administered instability, it kicks a hole in the record.

The intelligent move is putting “no body / know body” immediately afterward. Thirty-seven seconds. Almost nothing.

In “glass ceiling,” the guitar deserves attention. Cheek often uses very short groups of chords — triads, sometimes barely more — without giving the progression enough time to become properly circular. Here the effect is almost vertical: the song seems to gain height. The strings are plucked dry and stopped almost immediately, before they can open into full resonance. The result is a guitar built by subtraction, made as much from what is interrupted as from the notes actually played.

With “birthday,” the palette opens out again: Fender Rhodes, organ, trombone, trumpet, other voices around Cheek. It almost becomes the slow jam the album has been threatening to make for half an hour, but L’Rain leaves enough grit in the mechanism to keep the sensuality from smoothing itself out.

“church of no one” closes at over five minutes, the longest piece here. Piano, drums, guitar, tenor saxophone, percussion and electronics move with a strange patience. And yes, at some point I see Broadway. Not Broadway lit full-on, but Broadway badly retrieved from memory: signs already fading, orchestrations still stuck to the recollection after the scene that should have held them has disappeared.

Andrew Lappin, who co-produced the album with Cheek and Ben Chapoteau-Katz, has described parts of it as simultaneously volcanic and aquatic. The record was made between Gary’s Electric in Brooklyn and Welterweight Sound in Marlboro, New York, with Lappin also handling engineering and mixing.

Cheek considers fata morgana the final part of a four-album continuum beginning with L’Rain in 2017 and continuing through Fatigue and I Killed Your Dog. Lappin has said that for this record she wanted something like a summation of what had come before. It is, although “summation” sounds far tidier than the object itself.