Danish-born New York resident Soho Rezanejad is equally adept at both acting and singing. Perform And Surrender, though, is not at all what you might expect from a star of the big (or small) screen. Well, not unless you’ve already followed her career for the last five years anyway. If you have, you will have heard the term “starkwave” applied to her music in abundance and while that certainly applies here to an extent, most of the tunes here possess an eerie, and yes, ethereal quality about them. It’s not really a record where you can single out certain tracks and give commentary on them – it’s more akin to things like The Future Sound Of London‘s Life Forms, which works more as a complete piece, full of emotive imagery, sometimes accompanied by birdsong.
Apparently, Perform And Surrender “results from a series of performances presented between 2018 and 2019 in Copenhagen, Vienna, Helsingør, Munich, Montreal, Toronto, St. Petersburg, Tromsø, and Nantes. The series of presentations later adapted to a full-length album backed by poem recitations. Here, Rezanejad’s aim is the distillation of each city, jacketed in its spectators’ appetites.”
This is all the more remarkable due to the fact that, upon listening to Rezanejad, never once do we feel like we are in a theatre, nor a recording studio. The jungle? Maybe. In a field? Quite possibly. But never indoors. It’s a very naturistic sounding album that entices us to go out and discover the unknown, to intensify our perceptions of the world around us, just to get OUT there. We’ve never been locked down from going for a stroll in the woods, after all.
Speaking about the inception of the album, Rezanejad said “On the day of performance, I wrote small scores, bits of stage direction, or half-lit phantoms to activate the set. The performances became special to each space, each contributing a fragment to the record’s whole.” Expanding more on the new record, Rezanejad said “I lost someone very dear to me at the time. All things, especially in the practice of surrendering, resembled a testimony of life and death. The language of nature, especially in its falls and springs, played a substantial role in the album’s title and direction.”
One thing’s for certain, this latest long-player could easily double up as a relaxation tape for anyone who feels like everything’s too much, such is its beautiful calming essence. Tender, pretty, and easily digestible. Sweet dreams.
Perform And Surrender out now on Silicone Records.
