tara jane o'neil - where shine new lights

Tara Jane ONeil's music is integrated and contextual, idiosyncratic and deeply psychedelic, akin to a lucid dream journal caught on magnetic tape. She appears to be interested in all sounds equally. In her tireless search for a music that mirrors and reflects her alchemical, deeply syncretic approach to sound, color, language, surface and texture, she has found herself in a somewhat singular category.

Her concerns are free from fussing about form. Her albums posit some free space that owes more to improvisors and painters than singer-songwriters or new age synthesizer baths. She is still interested in songs, and she has always been a wordsmith, but her songs don't need to have words to signify. When words are utilized, she doesn't waste them. They are beautifully mystical outbursts of visionary poesis, but their narrative power is located within and informed by, the space, the harmonic color, the context in which they are sung.

Choral voicings spread out across the stereo field like muted cloud formations split by sudden outbursts of vibrant color, verdant mosses on ancient stones, opal sized windows of clear blue set against a vast horizon. Pump organ drones swell and respirate, patient and slow, with softly resonant gongs from the roof of the world. This is music about healing, about listening, about surviving and transmuting the strange inheritance of language. Moving towards a direct perception of apparent reality through collaboration, breath, sound and song.

TJO has always been a shapeshifter. Listen to this new album with open ears, forgetting any previous incarnation, or perception of what you believe this mercurial artist to be or to have been. Using some very basic recording equipment and her vivid musical imagination, she has achieved a rare essentialism wherein all unnecessary elements have been stripped away leaving only the most indispensable sounds. Concise, but expansive, stripped of unnecessary gestures; guitars resonate, amps hum, and an exquisite, languid melancholia appears out of the haze.