L'RAIN

Crossover Prog • United States

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L'Rain biography
L'Rain is the musical project of North American multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and curator Taja Cheek, based in her hometown of Brooklyn, New York. Formed around 2015 after the dissolution of her prior band Throw Vision, Cheek took up the pseudonym in early 2017 as an homage to her mother Lorraine C. Porter, a health-and-science teacher who passed away during the production of L'Rain's debut LP. Encouraged by her parents to pursue music, the self-taught bassist studied classical piano, cello and recorder in high school before continuing her passion at Yale University.

A self-declared "obsessive sponge for music", L'Rain's sui generis psychedelic neo-soul reflects her eclecticism, synthesising the R&B, rock and hip-hop artists introduced to Cheek by her father with her later passions for dream pop, free jazz, krautrock, gospel, ambient and Philip Glass-style minimalism. "Kaleidoscopic" is often used to describe her unpredictable, busy songs, whose technical acrobatics, genre-agnosticism and shifting time signatures signal a new and thrilling current of 21st-century progressive rock. Cheek also demonstrates a fondness for drone and musique concr�te, with each of her albums featuring experimental interludes incorporating candid field recordings equally inspired by Brandy and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Her looped and multilayered voice is the calm centre of her compositional storm, singing opaque lyrics primarily addressing loss and the end of relationships both romantic and platonic. In addition to being the former assistant curator at Queens' MoMA PS1, Cheek has toured with Big Thief, LCD Soundsystem and Sharon Van Etten, along with perennial influences Animal Collective and Deerhunter as well as British post-rockers black midi and Black Country, New Road. As of 2023, L'Rain is a full-fledged band consisting of Cheek as well as close collaborators and co-producers Andrew Lappin and Ben Chapoteau-Katz, in addition to Strugglin''s Justin Felton, Jachary's Zachary Levine-Caleb and jazz drummer Timothy Angulo.

Over a three-year period, Cheek and Lappin sorted through her backlog of private SoundCloud demos to compile her eponymous first album, which was released to positive press via Astro Nautico in late 2017, its concept a meditation on processing the death of loved ones. The duo were supplemented by additional musicians Alex Goldberg on drums, Jeremy Powell on saxophone and TV on the Radio's Kyp Malone on background vocals. A delux...L'Rain is the musical project of North American multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and curator Taja Cheek, based in her hometown of Brooklyn, New York. Formed around 2015 after the dissolution of her prior band Throw Vision, Cheek took up the pseudonym in early 2017 as an homage to her mother Lorraine C. Porter, a health-and-science teacher who passed away during the production of L'Rain's debut LP. Encouraged by her parents to pursue music, the self-taught bassist studied classical piano, cello and recorder in high school before continuing her passion at Yale University.

A self-declared "obsessive sponge for music", L'Rain's sui generis psychedelic neo-soul reflects her eclecticism, synthesising the R&B, rock and hip-hop artists introduced to Cheek by her father with her later passions for dream pop, free jazz, krautrock, gospel, ambient and Philip Glass-style minimalism. "Kaleidoscopic" is often used to describe her unpredictable, busy songs, whose technical acrobatics, genre-agnosticism and shifting time signatures signal a new and thrilling current of 21st-century progressive rock. Cheek also demonstrates a fondness for drone and musique concr�te, with each of her albums featuring experimental interludes incorporating candid field recordings equally inspired by Brandy and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Her looped and multilayered voice is the calm centre of her compositional storm, singing opaque lyrics primarily addressing loss and the end of relationships both romantic and platonic. In addition to being the former assistant curator at Queens' MoMA PS1, Cheek has toured with Big Thief, LCD Soundsystem and Sharon Van Etten, along with perennial influences Animal Collective and Deerhunter as well as British post-rockers black midi and Black Country, New Road. As of 2023, L'Rain is a full-fledged band consisting of Cheek as well as close collaborators and co-producers Andrew Lappin and Ben Chapoteau-Katz, in addition to Strugglin''s Justin Felton, Jachary's Zachary Levine-Caleb and jazz drummer Timothy Angulo.

Over a three-year period, Cheek and Lappin sorted through her backlog of private SoundCloud demos to compile her eponymous first album, which was released to positive press via Astro Nautico in late 2017, its concept a meditation on processing the death of loved ones. The duo were supplemented by additional musicians Alex Goldberg on drums, Jeremy Powell on saxophone and TV on the Radio's Kyp Malone on background vocals. A deluxe version of the album, featuring eighteen new remixes, was issued in 2018, and the same year saw Chapoteau-Katz's introduction into L'Rain, working with Cheek, producer Morgan Wiley and singer Patrick Gordon on a cover of Jamie Principle's "Your Love" for the Bring Down the Walls prison-abolitionist benefit compilation. L'Rain signed to Mexican Summer in 2021, which released her sophomore full-length Fatigue a few months later. Appearing on Pitchfork Media's best-of-2021 list and dubbed album-of-the-year by The Wire magazine, Fatigue fleshed out her psych-pop sound even further with the help of nearly twenty collaborators, continuing to address themes of grief as well as exhaustion from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

L'Rain garnered even more praise for her third LP, 2023's I Killed Your Dog, which Cheek wryly described as an "anti-break-up" record lyrically addressed to her younger self, conceptually exploring "what it means to hurt the people you love the most."

(Gordy, February 2024)read more