Maria BC - Hyaline (2022) [Hi-Res]

“Hyaline” (released 27 May 2022) is the debut album from Ohio-born, Oakland, CA based artist and songwriter, Maria BC. Following last year’s debut EP “Devil’s Rain” which received critical praise from Pitchfork, BBC Radio 6 Music, KEXP and more, Maria created “Hyaline” across their untreated Brooklyn apartment in Summer 2021, like a wandering spirit gaining energy from different spaces.

Their classically-trained mezzo-soprano voice soars over raw, etherial guitars; audio samples from Prospect Park – now almost unrecognizable – dapple across minimal percussion; organ, played by Maria BC’s dad at his church in Ohio, settle alongside tender, transformative harmonies. Mixing together different sessions, tracks recorded directly into their phone and samples collected over the years, Maria BC likens Hyaline to a “sonic collage.” It’s a project of patience, and trusting the process.

“Hyaline”, the album title, describes something that is clear and translucent like glass, especially a smooth sea. For Maria, song-writing is a stretched blank canvas awaiting the strokes of an exhale, and it’s this slow-moving process that rewards us the ease of a crystalline sky, without forgetting the clouds that may have come before it. A knife's-edge balance of intimacy and ambiguity, “Hyaline” accesses snapshots of grief, anxiety and wonder through a miscellany of specters: these are ghost stories, but not as we know them.