An art-rock illusionist rewrites pop in her own image

In the 17th century, sailors of the Dutch East India Trading Company recounted seeing a ghostly ship appear beyond the horizon, seeming to float in mid-air.The Flying Dutchman is just one such seabound vision; history holds accounts of entire fairy castles materializing on the distant waves.

Reactions to this "Fata Morgana," the light-bending optical illusion most commonly offered to explain such tales, can tell us a lot about point of view."I have never beheld the enchantment of the Straits of Messina, that Fata Morgana, when, under certain conditions of weather, phantasmagoric palaces of wondrous shape are cast upon the waters — not mirrored, but standing upright; tangible, as it were; yet diaphanous as a veil of gauze," Norman Douglas wrote in the 1915 book Old Calabria, as if even the conditional nature of the mirage was part of its sorcery.

He added: "The apparition is coy."Much of what we accept as truth is never witnessed firsthand, merely bestowed and accepted.It is with that phenomenon in mind that the innovative singer and producer Taja Cheek renders a warped and wonderful new album, her latest project as L'Rain.

Phantasmagoric and enchanting, her fata morgana is a musical embodiment of its namesake: a coy specter of sound rather than light, conjuring an image that can, at times, feel more real than anything else.L'Rain is no stranger to the hallucinatory and mind-boggling.Across her previous three albums, she has charted new pathways in psychedelic music, creating chimeras of soul, rock, post-punk, shoegaze and R&B that play with the textures of ambient music and sound collage.

Her 2021 album Fatigue grappled with the weight of the pandemic and BLM protests via sprawling, heady soundscapes peopled with field recordings.The 2023 follow-up I Killed Your Dog was grander, more audacious in its immediacy, turning an electronic-infused prog rock jam into a fantastical, portal-filled reverie.

Here, she sets out to reconcile her self-image with all its...