These are compositions to listen to again and again, to marvel at for their beauty and their sophisticated design, perhaps to attempt to deconstruct the album’s technical complexity, to melt at the range of vocal performance by Briana Marela.
You Are a Wavepulls on heartstrings, gently rocking one deeper into the fragile crevices of the artist’s loneliness, grief, and even joy. Marela takes her time building on these textures to craft the rawness of her experience in reinterpreted sonic space. By paying particular attention to the silence between the notes, and sedated rhythmic Buchla oscillations, she casts whimsical yet meaningful constellations of sound—like the unimaginably distant connections between stars within an ever-expanding universe. The tracks “Turquoise and Amethyst” and “Arc” display this expansive space-play best, while others showcase a near-operatic mix of contemporary classical interludes, vocal sound experiments, and gut-wrenching poetry. Gripping, intimate, a must-listen.
