When undergoing gender transition, one may develop an alternative relationship to time. With long waiting lists and a multitude of setbacks, the patient can feel they’re dangling between an imagined, increasingly abstract future and a past that no longer belongs to them. Waiting to inhabit a body that finally feels like one’s own—and being made to keep waiting, and waiting, and waiting—can change one’s disposition towards the past, present, and future. It is a kind of “queer time,” a temporal reality that Dear Laika explores on Pluperfect Mind, an album she wrote at the beginning of her transition, while isolated in England’s North Wessex Downs.
Dear Laika is the moniker of the classically trained musician Isabelle Thorn. As a child in the South of England, Thorn sang in church choirs and listened to classical music, two influences that have followed her to adulthood. Today, the 23 year old sounds equally inspired by the austere romanticism of post-minimalist composers like John Adams and Max Richter as she does modern glitch artists like Vladislav Delay and Markus Popp of Oval. There’s a touch of avant-pop in her music too, like if the Guggenheim commissioned late-career Kate Bush to write an experimental opera.
Following a batch of one-off songs and self-released albums, Pluperfect Mind is Dear Laika’s debut for the experimental label NNA Tapes. It is a prodigiously ambitious, suite-like album that collages into a canvas of unusual breadth: a polytonal patchwork comprising field recordings, thunderous chorales, darkwave vocals, and abrupt cuts. Its disorientating compositions burn, unfurl, explode, distort, clarify, slow down, and accelerate—often within the same song—mirroring the wavy contours of queer time. Her lyrics, while often poetic and archaic, also address this liminal state head-on: “Where are my memories? Where is my childhood? Where is my tomorrow?”
Pluperfect Mind begins violently, grabbing you by the throat with what sounds like string instruments inside an industrial shredder. The enormous sound recedes, and Thorn’s piano begins to tinkle lightly, like wood chips made of violin. The sound of nature—birdsong, barking dogs, rumbling thunder—is a leitmotif throughout the record, filling its delicate atmosphere. This vacillation between machinic violence and naturalism is a recurring dynamic, one that echoes the feeling of Thorn’s queer time. “I count the months for flesh to rectify/By time-lapsed clouds against a frozen sky,” she sings over a digitally synthesized new age choir on “Phlebotomy,” marking the discordance between her inner rhythm and that of the natural world.
Thorn’s voice is pure and choirgirl-like, a more holy and less sultry companion to FKA twigs’ expressive, crystalline vocals. Whether she’s layering her parts as intricately as a choirmaster, or letting them breathe during a solo, Thorn emits a precise emotional force. On “Guinefort’s Grave,” the rhythm of her breath and the subtle panic in her voice make it sound as though she is paddling a small boat against a tsunami.
Thorn’s music works in fits and starts, obscuring time’s arrow with glitches and distortion. But on “Asleep in Wildland Fire,” her prepared piano—a technique that involves placing screws between the instrument’s strings to temporarily alter its sound, popularized by John Cage and more recently used by Kelly Moran—plonks ahead in perpetual motion. “I am ready, I am ready, I am ready,” Thorn screams, signalling both her actualization and the restoration of linear time. Rather than letting her narrative resolve neatly, the album’s final two songs explode with chaotic beauty, like a spinning weathervane. A chapter has closed, but Pluperfect Mind never quite rests.
Buy: Rough Trade
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