In the 17th century, sailors of the Dutch East India Trading Company recounted seeing a ghostly ship appear beyond the horizon, seeming to float in mid-air. The Flying Dutchman is just one such seabound vision; history holds accounts of entire fairy castles materializing on the distant waves. Reactions to this "Fata Morgana," the light-bending optical illusion most commonly offered to explain such tales, can tell us a lot about point of view. "I have never beheld the enchantment of the Straits of Messina, that Fata Morgana, when, under certain conditions of weather, phantasmagoric palaces of wondrous shape are cast upon the waters — not mirrored, but standing upright; tangible, as it were; yet diaphanous as a veil of gauze," Norman Douglas wrote in the 1915 book Old Calabria, as if even the conditional nature of the mirage was part of its sorcery. He added: "The apparition is coy."
Much of what we accept as truth is never witnessed firsthand, merely bestowed and accepted. It is with that phenomenon in mind that the innovative singer and producer Taja Cheek renders a warped and wonderful new album, her latest project as L'Rain. Phantasmagoric and enchanting, her fata morgana is a musical embodiment of its namesake: a coy specter of sound rather than light, conjuring an image that can, at times, feel more real than anything else.
L'Rain is no stranger to the hallucinatory and mind-boggling. Across her previous three albums, she has charted new pathways in psychedelic music, creating chimeras of soul, rock, post-punk, shoegaze and R&B that play with the textures of ambient music and sound collage. Her 2021 album Fatigue grappled with the weight of the pandemic and BLM protests via sprawling, heady soundscapes peopled with field recordings. The 2023 follow-up I Killed Your Dog was grander, more audacious in its immediacy, turning an electronic-infused prog rock jam into a fantastical, portal-filled reverie. Here, she sets out to reconcile her self-image with all its projections.
As an artist and thinker, Cheek has often occupied in-between states, at times contradictory in nature but always intentionally so. She made a labor-intensive record about exhaustion, and an "anti-breakup" experiment obsessed with dissolution, its self-proclaimed "basic bitch" songcraft only underlining her virtuosity. She often sings of the surreal, and her lyrics revel in ambiguity. "Past, present, future, hybrid creatures / Doesn't matter if they're real, I fear they're real," she sang on "Suck Teeth," from Fatigue. "You know I'm invisible / Cut the bulls*** and make me into something else," goes a line on I Killed Your Dog's "Pet Rock." This time around, she directly probes her own state of being, as an experimental artist seeking her next transformation. "You will learn your ways with time," she coos hauntingly on fata morgana's "with time," like a wail oozing from the Dutchman's lower decks. Is it a warning or a promise?
L'Rain has urged listeners to be less precious with her music — to treat "experimental" like a mindset anchoring her through a liberated process, not a brand tagging her as too esoteric for primetime. "I was just noticing how people were treating my music with white gloves," she told The New York Times this month. "I'm thinking about wanting more for myself and just sort of looking up and being like, 'Is this a glass ceiling or not? Will I be able to evolve? Will I be able to grow? And what is stopping that? Is it me or is it other people?'"
Paradoxically, "experimental" can be a box. As a genre signifier, it comes with crank expectations. As a creative ethic, it can be ostracizing, placing its subject outside the reach of a populist framework. Listen carefully to the moves made from Fatigue to I Killed Your Dog and it's easy to hear an artist working through how to be more accessible, without surrendering her abnormality. Wondrously, fata morgana is the marvel that cracks her music's warp field — both alien and familiar, not "either/or" but "yes/and." L'Rain's co-producer Andrew Lappin called the music "craggy," but there are also moments of sweetness that evanesce as sound beds shift, surge and dissolve. Though it may feel like a stretch to call this "pop" music, that's really what the artist seems to be getting at with her line of questioning: How long will experimentalism be treated as a barrier, separating her songs from the pop realm?
As she straddles the two spaces like never before, her response is to go full meta: uninhibited music about overcoming inhibitions. This is music that clearly sees experimenting as part of an evolutionary cycle bringing the artist closer to her pop center — which is to say, her most contemporary and intelligible self. Just take "july 5th" and "elmyra," songs as tuneful and lustrous as they are woozy and mesmerizing, the former atmospheric, the latter aquatic. They feel like the music she has been yearning to make all along. "bedroom songs" is a mothership entering Earth's atmosphere, and as it bleeds into the strobing "borderline," an act of terraforming is underway, its drums kicking up a sandstorm as her vocals convert all the oxygen into a sweeping smog. "Borderline / Shape the land in our design / Yours and mine / Strip of land in our design," she hums.
Repetition generates a series of powerful mantras, ushering her across thresholds of image and perception. "Shadows can only be made from the light," she repeats on "blue." Amid the primary chant of "endless cycle" — "I'm a psycho cycle" — are loopier turns of phrase: "I am so sick of being so sickening / I apologize for apologizing." The album begins with her "trying to start" and winds down with her asking "Is it worth it?" on an R&B ballad that doubles as a self-interrogation. By the end, she approaches something resembling an answer, finding a disembodied selfhood. "I feel realer these days / With no body / Don't know no body / I want mirror decay," she sings on "church of no one."
"Realness" and "image," those most basic human concepts, are full of inherent tensions. Susan Sontag, in her landmark book On Photography, quoted philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, saying that a post-camera world prefers "the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence." Sontag's assessment: "The further back we go in history … the less sharp is the distinction between images and real things," hence all those urban legends inspired by some shimmering Fata Morgana.
Sontag was writing in the context of photographs, but in an age of overwhelming exposure to images, it follows that our understanding of mental image follows a more digital set of rules. Discerning the real from the imaginary has rarely felt harder than it does now, and the difference between image and reality may be even more confounding. In the minds of many, how you are perceived is who you are.
L'Rain, having recognized a similar relationship between her art — as she understands it — and the psychic effigies that represent it once it enters the discourse, here takes her image back. If grand cultural ideas will inevitably influence how her music is remembered, then making music about those ideas may be the greatest possible act of self-empowerment.
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