Rachel Lime – Nacrée
Today, Brooklyn-based artist Rachel Lime releases “Nacrée,” the second single from her forthcoming album, STORIES, out April 10th. In conjunction, she announces an album release show in Brooklyn at Union Pool on April 8th.
Like a mosaic set with various, variegated stones, each track from STORIES is distinct in color, shape, and shine. “Nacrée” burns with measured urgency, immersing listeners in pulsing synth and intimate vocals. The evocative instrumental continuously evolves throughout the track, rising and falling in organic waves of catharsis. As felt within “Nacrée,” the songs on STORIES act as a collection of fables — meant to unveil half-glimpsed memories, myths, from childhood and beyond.
Reflecting on the song, Lime says: “This is a spring 2020 lockdown song I wrote about desire when I wasn’t able to fulfill it. The lyrics are completely unaltered from that first iphone notes app draft and I built the song around the words, playing around with sampling my own vocals, sighs, breaths. I wanted sounds that brought to life the lyrics, the ‘long blue afternoon’ and ‘sea and milk,’ the ‘black strand’ of the seashore as evening falls. Water, and specifically the ocean, has always had such a sensual, sexual connotation for me—the salt! The grit of sand on your skin. The sun and water touching every part of you. It’s funny because I’m definitely repressed in that I struggle to take myself seriously singing a, idk, kind of sexy song, but it’s exactly this kind of boldness I wanted to bring to this album. Less lonely, intellectual pining—more risk and drama.”
A collection of fables, the songs on STORIES carry forward themes of longing, of fantasy, of the kind of fiction that is all the more real for not being biographically true. They are a call for listeners to recall half-glimpsed memories and myths, from childhood and beyond. The album’s first single, “Elided,” is based on the fantasy/speculative fiction book The Traitor Baru Cormorant; “Water Lily Bloom” is from the imagined perspective of the Lady of Shalott trapped in her castle; “Jangdan” samples traditional Korean pansori vocals; “Wild Raspberries,” is a rescued track from when Lime was 19, composing on GarageBand using her laptop keyboard as a MIDI input, and so forth.
Mixed by Brian Tench (Kate Bush, Hounds of Love, among many others) and mastered by Nicholas Bolton, STORIES marks a turn for Lime towards more rhythmic, synth-driven textures, combining the lush orchestration of her earlier work with more dance-forward grooves. It is an album equally at home in a forest, or on the beach, as it is on an (admittedly) explorative, experimental dance floor. Lime says: “It is an album about protagonists who seek pleasure, who are afraid of it, who are intoxicated by it, who grieve the loss of it. I wanted to create an album that situates the listener fully in their body, while still playing with the literary, cerebral themes I explored in my earlier work.”
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