Mara - Here Behold Your Own [Sige Records Promo]

Scheduled for release via Sige Records on September 13th, 2k19 is "Here Behold Your Own", the forthcoming longplay outing by Faith Coloccia's solo project Mara. With both the accompanied press info as well as the cover of the promotional CD  announcing the albums side A as "A New Young Birth" and side B as "Sangre De Cristo" whilst the actual promo CD is showing indices of fourteen tracks we're a little confused about what is going on here, yet we're sure that we're actually listening to the described transformation of Mara throughout the process of becoming a mother, deriving melodies from self-created lullabies she would sing to her son to be. With the results presenting both instrumental and vocal-led approaches coated by heavy layers of vintage dust or multiple blurred out, dusty tape delays we're exposed to a whole range of musical variety on this album - a spectrum ranging from crackly, mystical vocal outings, beautiful fragments of old time piano romanticism, worn out, slightly warped score pieces for movies long forgotten, peaceful, reverberating Folk songs reminiscent of a vocal approach partly brought forward and popularized by artists like Sinead  O'Connor in the early 90s, electroacoustic minimalism, rhythmic Noize movements, organ-inspired harmonic layers and way more. Yet this broad variety, but also the overall atmosphere, vibe and tonality to be experienced on "Here Behold Your Own" somehow makes it seem like we are not actually listening to a selection of cassette recordings from the years 2015 to 2018 but rather to the unearthed body of work of an early electronic music pioneer for a reason. Intredasting.