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
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
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
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
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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