Music has a profound and physical effect on the human body. I know I’m listening to sounds that are touching my soul when I feel them caress my skin until it’s shivering. When tones pull at the water in my body like the phases of the moon and it begins to pool in my eyelids. When the music itself is no longer a separate experience but one that I’m breathing into my lungs and pumping through my veins.
As I listen to L’Rain, her voice is pouring into my eardrums, mixing into my perception of this moment. The way she effortlessly blends instruments, effects, samples, and vocals into a cohesive sonic body makes me think about the energy that’s endlessly changed and morphed and created since the dawn of time and before. There’s no boundary between her music and my listening; she’s brought me into her world, and it’s at once breathtaking and blissful and violent.
Her album Fatigue came out earlier this year via Mexican Summer and you can pick it up here. It’s a musical, emotional, and psychological expression of how the centuries have worn on in a cycle of pain, loss, grief, and survival for Black people in America and across the globe. As L’Rain explains, “Black people, who, in the face of violence and discrimination, are often given little time to process.” Subject to a state that reminds us of its white supremacy on a daily basis, never allowing wounds to heal and life to flourish. Robbing people of their right to safety, liberty, love, and life.
This whole record feels like a healing process that’s both neverending and too brief. Fatigue reminds me that music is a tool of healing as much as it is one of expressing the suffering that tears us open. Both go hand in hand and L’Rain’s voice takes us down through our layers into ourselves. Right now spend some time listening and feeling into the experimental melodies of L’Rain.
Collectively, we are navigating the immense and looming figure of unremitting fatigue brought on by the ongoing pandemic, mass death, continued violence against Black people at the hands of the state, and the mountain range of systemic problems obstructing safety and security for the people that need it most. This quick succession of events wears our resilience to weariness. To question the nature of change with the awareness of weariness is to question the nature of exhaust: what are we putting out?
https://lrain.bandcamp.com/album/fatigue
20/01/2022 The Loft @ UCSD, San Diego, CA
21/01/2022 Zebulon, Los Angeles, CA
22/01/2022 Rickshaw Stop, San Francisco, CA
24/01/2022 Mississippi Studios, Portland, OR
25/01/2022 Fremont Abbey, Seattle, WA
07/03/2022 The National w/ Animal Collective, Richmond, VA
08/03/2022 Union Transfer w/ Animal Collective, Philadelphia, PA
10/03/2022 MASS MoCA w/ Animal Collective, North Adams, MA
11/03/2022 Brooklyn Steel w/ Animal Collective, Brooklyn, NY
12/03/2022 9:30 Club w/ Animal Collective, Washington, D.C.
14/03/2022 Paradise w/ Animal Collective, Boston, MA
15/03/2022 Starland Ballroom w/ Animal Collective, Sayreville, NJ
17/03/2022 Mr. Smalls w/ Animal Collective, Pittsburgh, PA
18/03/2022 Majestic w/ Animal Collective, Detroit, MI
19/03/2022 Vic Theatre w/ Animal Collective, Chicago, IL
20/03/2022 First Avenue w/ Animal Collective, Minneapolis, MN
22/03/2022 Newport Music Hall w/ Animal Collective, Columbus, OH
23/03/2022 Marathon Music Works w/ Animal Collective, Nashville, TN
24/03/2022 Big Ears Music Festival, Knoxville, TN
25/03/2022 The Eastern w/ Animal Collective, Atlanta, GA
