Leya are a New York duo consisting of harpist Marilu Donovan and violinist Adam Markiewicz who seem to occupy a space roughly equidistant from ambient music, avant-garde composition and drone-based electronica. They soundtracked (and starred in) a porn film directed by rapper Brooke Candy; they have collaborated on the runways of fashion designers including Louis Vuitton, Calvin Klein, Acne Studios and Hood by Air; and they’ve worked with dozens of musicians on the frontiers of experimental pop and the avant-garde, such as Christina Vanzu and members of Coil.
I Forget Everything is their first release since 2022’s Eyeline, working with like-minded mavericks Actress, Claire Rousay and Julie Byrne, who added string sections and electronics. This strips away these ornaments and concentrates on Leya’s eerie core elements – multi-tracked violins shrouded in spectral reverberation; ghostly vocals; arpeggios played on a harp that sounds like it’s constantly changing. On the corners, these arpeggios come crashing down like rain; on Fake, his vamps are slow and deliberate, where every chord change sounds like a titanic feat.
The defining feature of Leya’s sound is Markiewicz’s voice. He sings in an androgynous, yawning whisper, his diction so slurred he’s beginning to resemble Liz Fraser of the Cocteau Twins. At times, on the eerie, drone-based Baited , it sounds like a male voice in a Gregorian choir, but more often it sounds like an opera singer moving from contralto to a mezzo-soprano register. Most startling is Weaving, which sounds like a minor gothic anthem that has been beamed down from another dimension. The effect is eerie and unsettling throughout, music that sounds both 300 years old and somewhere in the distant future.
Also this month
Playlists of “relaxing” piano music are hugely popular, but few are as captivating as Piano1, a compilation of Section1 recordings featuring contemporary composers including the delightfully clumsy Laraaji, the muted tones of Alice Boman, the machine-prepared piano of ML Buch and the rapturous improvisations of Ichiko Aoba and Alan Wiffles. The last full-length album by Zeena ParkinsDam Against the Spring Tide (Relative Pitch) sees her playing the harp alongside an unorthodox ensemble, but the highlight is the ultra-sharp and downright terrifying first half. Oliver Johnson of Vienna, AKA Dorian conceptis best known for his rather majestic rave music on Ninja Tune, but his latest project Music From a Room Full of Synths (-OUS Records) sees him launch into the true sonic playground that is the Swiss Museum of Electronic Musical Instruments, where he creates an extremely diverse range of Wendy Carlos-esque miniatures on a set of archival analog synths.