Portland, Oregon-based singer-songwriter R Zak has a musical background that’s taken her from hardcore punk and reggae acts and opening for the likes of Buckethead and Beirut with her former indie band The Apple Miner Colony, to the more amorphous, experimental space she currently occupies.
Her latest offering Dialectics makes good use of electronics, from crystal-cut melodies to more avant-garde sound collages, but at the core of the sound is her bewitching, stirring voice. Possibly leaning to ethereal folk – opening track ‘Villanelle’, for example, and a few others here all have a touch of ‘The Wicker Man’ soundtrack to it – it summons up the ancient or even timeless and as such creates a great dynamic when placed up against the shiny digital flourishes that modern production can throw up.
The obvious reference points – the sparkly spangles pop of the Cocteau Twins and Bjork’s eccentric impressionistic electro-pop experiments – are relevant, but R Zak never resembles them, merely occupies a similarly heaven-slanted and freeform territory. Her former incarnations inform this project too. She flexes her skills as classically trained viola player throughout, but most noticeably on the truly haunting, eerie ‘Dewy Dreams’, which again makes much of the friction between old and new approaches. ‘Silver Slow Moving’ has a goth-edged indie feel, the swirling chorus-heavy guitars driven along by a neatly programmed drum machine. ‘Caracola’, meanwhile, has the kind of fragile, weeping guitar that fans of girl in red will swoon for. There are even hints of reggae sensibilities that she’s evidently carried with her from the past, manifesting themselves as much in the spacious, slow motion grooves as anything more blatant.
“There’s no training or even protocol when it comes to real music making, “ R Zak herself says. “There’s only immersion. It just becomes a physical need like the need for truth. The music simply has to come to life through you; you are just a vessel for it. Nothing else can really touch you at that point. The music gives you such strength and independence while at the same time bonding you emotionally with the entire world. It’s so mysterious!”
Mysterious is definitely the word for it – a weird and wonderful concoction of the unexpected and the unlikely that packs maximum emotional punch and plenty of supernatural eeriness along the way. You should hear it – but maybe not when you’re alone after dark!
