Briana Marela turns the every day into the fantastical. Objects like handheld mirrors and light bulbs transform into musical instruments; her voice and body movements distort by electronic processing into contorted and simmering sounds. Through these dreamy transformations, she explores undeniably human sentiments: The desire for deeper understanding of the self, inner peace, artistic freedom. On My Inner Rest, she showcases the breadth of her musical worlds in twelve compositions that, together, form an eerie song cycle woven from the threads of the unknown.
My Inner Rest captures a live performance of Marela’s at Mills College, during which she connected to body sensors that picked up her movements and returned them as scampering electronic music. As a purely musical artifact, its themes become more present than the act of performance, though her body remains a central focus. Named after an artwork by Madge Gill, who felt she was guided by a spirit, the album follows the arc of a short story telling of the tumult of finding the creative self. It begins in eerie stillness, almost bubbling up to the surface but not quite, then spirals into darkness and emerges in light, much like metaphors for the ups and downs of discovering one’s identity.
Marela’s songs unfold in choppy pieces that regularly veer into new directions, built from short vocal phrases and ambient electronics. In the best moments, her effervescent electronics feel reminiscent of artists like Laurie Spiegel, taking a forward, oscillating approach to their motion. Tracks like ‘Abandon’, for example, blossom from tense moments into feathery ambiance as rhythms and melodies unfurl. However, the music’s severe pauses can cause it to feel stilted. Tracks like the opener ‘Selfless’ seem to stay in one place, made of echoing vocals that hang in one mezzoforte and hang in long rests, while tracks like ‘Willful or Self-Willed’ roam without direction.
But as the album nears its end, it finds solid ground in a fuller, richer sound. ‘Brightest Star’ successfully tries out a pop song structure to drive its booming resonance, and ‘Suspended’ fully channels the darkness lurking in Marela’s compositions into a dark thicket of electronics. In these moments of immersion, we’re invited to fully enter Marela’s universe, collapsing the distance between her imaginative music and the real world. In between realms, Marela finds her greatest strength – neither hope nor fear, sadness or joy. Instead, it’s euphoria born from a little bit of every emotion, returned in a truer form.
