Holy Prana Open Game, by Natalie Rose LeBrecht

Holy Prana Open Game

by Natalie Rose LeBrecht

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galactic pot-dealer Bliss... this is like heaven.

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1.	Home 09:15	lyrics	buy track
The deluge has come and you’re still silenced by the tower, yearning for a bone A silver branch grows up your spine A snake with venom, its bite wakes you to the core Snake rattle shakes the shadows free They dance like smoke wild in the breeze Drink this potion, I dare you to try Your trip will be the ransom that you pay to come to life Summoning the courage to venture out in flight Ohhh, you’re coming home tonight Snake rattle shakes the shadows free They form into clouds and cry for all beings The goddess of the moon smiles as she marries you to the tide Oh it’s a beautiful passage of time, the entrancing theater of the divine You’re coming home tonight You’re coming home tonight You’re coming home tonight
2.	Prana 10:29	lyrics	buy track
One mile out and not a sign, searching for the castle on the horizon Ten miles out and raindrops are falling without a cloud in the sky Rainbow around the sun, rose petal spritz on our halos Mind to mind, mind to mind, mind to mind Time, the illusionist has come to weigh us down from flying Prana dances through stardust to form us, to form us Bell rings echo infinitely throughout all eternity, Ah Close your eyes and tune into the patterns of light inside your mind Don’t be afraid of the quiet, or vast open space You are not lost when you are still Mind to mind, let go of time, all is divine, we never really die
3.	Holy 03:58	lyrics	buy track
Weighing fear against your core, searching for the apple tree You can be the one who lays down your gun Holy birds in all directions, singing with the setting sun You know there’s a truth behind everyone Reflectors, empty projectors A blank canvas like the sky at night, staging our dance of shadow and light Now I find your hidden answers wild with possibilities I can be the one who lays down my gun Holy words in my confession, accepting my reckoning I know there’s a truth behind everything Reflectors, empty projectors A blank canvas like the sky at night, staging our dance of shadow and light
4.	Amok 06:19	info	buy track
5.	Open 09:03	lyrics	buy track
You’re on the moon where silver specks scintillate hypnotically Against the velvet blackness of space erupts a portal of light Empyrean, pulling you in, as your heart bursts wide open Wiping your eyes, wondering if you’ve died Looking around at a world beyond surmise Where roses sing and pure water springs to life In this realm of being, nothing harms anything Just lives of light, lives of light, lives of light, lives of colorful delight Feasting your eyes, never more alive Radiating in a world where thoughts don’t occur… Just the playful expression of prana unfurled In this realm it seems, the moon was just a dream Now is here, now is here Dissolved in a glowing sphere
6.	Game Over 02:25	lyrics	buy track
The mesmerizing golden phoenix with bright red eyes soars above you in the sky It guides and you follow as if there’s no tomorrow, there’s only right now today Like a retired actress, you’ve left the stage The road is now unpaved Just look up at the sky and never really die

about

When I first heard Natalie Rose LeBrecht's time-suspending, air-ionizing music, more than twenty years ago, I thought "this kid is on to something." She's been proving that thought right ever since. Her recordings, from the teenage 4-track tapes she made as Greenpot Bluepot to the recent albums under her own name, have been fascinating dispatches from her progressively deeper dives into her gorgeous, weird, wildly idiomatic aesthetic. Holy Prana Open Game is a jewel of intensely personal cosmic music, created through a remarkable process of openness, craftiness, addition and subtraction. It belongs to a tradition of albums that document a rich, meditative sound as it rises up to join the world outside its creators' minds: Alice Coltrane's Universal Consciousness, Harmonia's Musik von Harmonia, Philip Glass's North Star, Talk Talk's Laughing Stock.

"Meditative" is specifically the idea here: Holy Prana Open Game had its origins in the fourteen days LeBrecht spent silently meditating in her home's small music room in the summer of 2019. "I came out of that bursting with the will to create new music," she says, and she created it sound-first. LeBrecht taught herself to program an analog synthesizer's timbres from scratch, and built a new set of glacial, heady compositions out of them, eventually singing to accompany the keyboard parts she was playing.

Then she closed her eyes at her computer, "let my mind be clear and open, imagined light pouring down through me, and began auto-writing to my memory of the music playing through my mind. Most of the lyrics emerged this way, and then I used my conscious mind to refine them a bit at the end." One other song came along with LeBrecht's new pieces, a cover that seems wildly unlikely from the outside and makes total sense in its context: it's a version of Atoms for Peace's "Amok" (which had been created by improvisation and editing, too), mutated into her own idiolect.

In early March of 2020, LeBrecht recorded Holy Prana Open Game's analog synth parts with Martin Bisi at his studio in Brooklyn--and then the world shut down. As you may have gathered, LeBrecht is very much a spiritual, head-in-the-stars type. She is also extremely hardcore, and if making the art she wants to make means doing things the hard way, she cracks her knuckles and gets down to it. Within weeks, she had taught herself how to record, mix and edit with a digital audio workstation. She recorded her vocal parts (sometimes multi-tracked into a radiant choir) at home, assembled a rough mix of the album, and sent it off to her collaborators.

LeBrecht spent some years studying with and assisting La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela at their legendary sound-and-light installation, the Dream House. As with their work, her singular, precisely focused vision is shored up by its openness to artistic voices beyond her own. For Holy Prana Open Game, she worked with the Australian guitarist Mick Turner and drummer Jim White (both of Dirty Three, the Tren Brothers and innumerable other projects), as well as woodwind player David Lackner, a longtime presence on her recordings.

Turner and White have been playing together in one context or another since 1985; in the summer of 2020, they were only blocks from each other in Melbourne, Australia, whose strict lockdown meant they couldn't meet up to record together. So both of them, as well as Lackner, recorded their improvisational additions to LeBrecht's rough mixes individually, often without hearing each other's contributions. "I had asked them to play as much as they could on each track," she says, "and told them that I would edit it all down in post, so I had a lot of source material of theirs to work with."

LeBrecht arranged and edited the recordings from all four of their homes to flow together like breath across the duration of her suite. Prana, one of the album's central conceits, is in fact the Sanskrit word for breath, with the connotation of the breath of life. Like LeBrecht's music, prana flows at its own pace, and demands stillness to take in fully--but it's also subtly playful and surprising, a force that can be as light as air or as immersive as the atmosphere itself.

--Douglas Wolk

credits

released June 9, 2023

Natalie Rose LeBrecht: composer, producer, lyricist, analog synth, piano, vocals
David Lackner: woodwinds, ewi, additional synth on Prana & Open
Mick Turner: guitar
Jim White: drums
Daniel Subkoff: background vocals on Home

Mastered by Stephan Mathieu
Mix Consulting by Dana Wachs, Jason van Wyk
Album Artwork by NRL
Insert calligraphy by Daniel Subkoff
Layout/Design by Devin Shaffer

Released by American Dreams Records
Management: ASRA Touring and Management

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Natalie Rose LeBrecht New York, New York

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