Ariadne Randall – Her Water Dream/Image of a Blue Thumbs-Up
Oxtail Recordings
It starts abruptly, as if in the middle of a dream: “It was a distant time / Breaths moved along / the surface of the water,” half-spoken/half-sung over burbling vocal blips, sampled and multiplied, like ripples on that same water. It’s a mix of calm and urgency.
The latter comes from a sudden epiphany—after a lifetime of creative (and self-) exploration—of Ariadne Randall, a Vienna-based multimedia artist, who per her bio was raised by a “traveling apocalyptic evangelist and a gospel singer who roamed America’s Bible Belt.” In her notes, she writes that improvising the words for this opening song, “her water dream,” brought the realization that she is trans. The calm emerged from the certainty that came in that moment: “This is where you’re meant to me,” she sings at song’s end, and we feel that with her. It is transfixing and beautiful, portraying not a struggle but an arrival.
This spirit sustains through the album, her deft touches building on the influence of several experimental music giants. There’s Terry Riley in the rippling drones of “on that last shore,” Morton Subotnick in the microtonal “computer-error-filled” transcription of a 14th-century mass in “blunted (dover beach),” and Laurie Anderson in the droll look at the indiscriminate absurdity of “blue thumbs-up” social media likes, juxtaposed with German text from a Martin Luther hymn, on “blue (da ba dee).”
Most prominent is the influence of Robert Ashley, whose operas combine near-spoken words and lightly floating music to explore weird fractures of normal life. They’re found in Randall’s eye for the everyday banality of the exotic, from illicit restroom sex to the “kind of Buddhism you can buy in outlet stores” in “blunted.”
“as horizon” closes the album with ghostly Gothic drones behind a monologue of the terrors of queer childhood in conservative America, but also hope for a future of “no shame” in which “all this will not be wasted”—a hope Randall is determined to help realize. She has, indeed, arrived. – GRADE: A
You can check out Her Water Dream/Image of a Blue Thumbs-Up at Bandcamp and elsewhere.
