L’Rain – What Does Experimental Mean Now?

Music can be wildly intricate and still sound like the most natural thing in the world. That is the sweet spot Brooklyn-based songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer and curator Taja Cheek, better known as L’Rain, hits. This genre defiance reaches a new high on her fourth album Fata Morgana. We get into the uncomfortable backdrop that sits behind making any art right now, and how a record can be “about the world” through the experience of living through it. Taja shares why her process is intensely intuitive, how collaborators have to trust her when she is “following a light through a dark tunnel”, and how she keeps genre from turning into a costume by staying close to the centre of her own matrix. We also talk field recordings, realness and self-awareness, including voice messages, strangers, and the intimacy of cab driver conversations. Taja’s music has often been called experimental, and we dive into what this label does for an artist, where it becomes limiting, where it can also be suprisingly freeing and what it means to build a sustainable career with few obvious models, especially for women of colour making work that is hard to pin down. Lost and Sound is now fully independent, and listener support helps keep the project alive and growing. You can support the show for as little as the price of a coffee. I can’t offer Patreon-style bonus content at the moment — life is already too hectic to promise things I cannot properly deliver — but every contribution makes a real difference. Support the show If you enjoyed the episode, follow Lost and Sound on Substack and me on Instagram, subscribe to the RSS Feed, and share the episode with someone who’d be into it. Independent journalism and independent podcasting still run on word of mouth. L'Rain on Bandcamp Support the show Support the show