Shadows

Description

The second album by Cate Kennan, a musician from Los Angeles, entirely self-produced, unfolds with the poetry and immateriality of its title: Shadows. Ten vignettes of keyboards, strings, reverb, and voice, the tracks oscillate between dream and lullaby, in an atmosphere both soft and distant. The album was inspired by the uprootedness Kennan felt upon returning, after several years away, to the rustic neighborhood in northwest Los Angeles where she grew up: "Wandering in a place where my life once existed, but where everything has silently changed with time." The music evokes an atmosphere of distance, dust, and confused emotions, alternately soothing and unsettling. From hazy, vaporous vignettes ("The Lone West," "Romantic Strings") to melancholic ballads with sepia tones ("Shadows," "Reverie") and enigmatic keyboard meditations ("Moonlight," "Rain"), Kennan's sonic universe unfolds with a muted and mysterious beauty, like haunting shapes glimpsed through a fogged-up glass. In her hands, mist becomes a transformative force, releasing melody and memory to project them into yet-unexplored landscapes: "What had begun as a period of nostalgia turned into a longing, not for the past, but for a place that might exist beyond the horizon."