LEYA - I Forget Everything (2024) [Hi-Res]

Amidst relief, memory is a window to something greater. We are at a loss in remembering; we slowly or quickly forget. In moving around, there is a loosening of the gaze and touch that tethers us to ourselves. In trying to get better, we may cease to remember some things.

I Forget Everything marks LEYA’s first return to the studio since 2022’s collaborative mixtape Eyeline, and their first release sans collaborators since 2020’s breakout classical-meets-everything tome Flood Dream. It comes on the heels of a relentless multi-year touring schedule, sandwiched amidst new collaborations with fashion houses, filmmakers, choreographers, and more, a blooming of their beguiling, potentially existent-in-any-context din into newer identities and spaces.

Since that period, LEYA (harpist Marilu Donovan and vocalist/violinist Adam Markiewicz) have sought to return to their basics - detuned harp, hazy strings, and wide-ranging, operatic vocals, all channeled through an unmistakably raw lens - and now begin to reimagine their language, harnessing production experiments that have been percolating in their tangential work in recent years.

I Forget Everything is LEYA’s first solo work with elements of electronic production, albeit nascent, ranging in sheen from home-recorded to high-fidelity, all generated solely from harp, strings, and voice. From the opener, “Eden of Haze,” there is a billowing (literal) hiss of energy that creeps in and remains present. Climbing, almost exaltant-sounding strings are resampled, overlapped and crushed back together, segueing into a troubled-feeling pagan folk song, then falling back into a dissonant, climbing wall of violins, beneath which more resonant chords slowly emerge as the first resampled strings play again until the track abruptly ends. “Corners,” which follows, finds LEYA inhabiting a larger, more luxurious sound, suggestive of something more cinematic, but still characteristically raw. A gothic, Glass-ian pop song, it feels like one they might have written for someone else to sing in the past, but now Markiewicz inhabits the central role. Throughout the release, his words are more audible than in previous records, inching closer to context, but still feel within the elusive slipstream that begets the everythingness of LEYA’s work.

“Baited,” the fourth song, marks the newest approach on the record. Missing is any live harp, but rather just a short looping sample of the decaying harp chord from the previous song, “Weaving.” This suggestion of Twin-Peaks-meets-Basinski feeling minimalism sounds like a wash between two close chords, panning with a restricted-feeling elasticity, along with periodic but not-quite-metric clicks and hisses. Markiewicz sings quietly and nakedly atop the track, “Walk like heaven but walk like heat.”

While some songs hark back to LEYA’s central, historical sound, they also see new deviations. “Weaving” harnesses the merged violin/vocal homophony that is characteristic of much of their work, but layered voices and harmonies scale to something wider-feeling, with bubbling strings emerging at the end to form an orchestral wash as a subdued chorus sings beneath. “Fake” is underscored by feathered, pulsing, subdued-yet-chaotic synth reverberations hidden beneath the harp that seem to react to its tones. “Mia” explores an increasingly processed orchestral environment: drifting strings and voices gently warp, decay, and bubble up again.

I Forget Everything regards a haven scorned. It is a reaction to the inevitability of loss. There is a haven some of us might collectively choose to abandon, an indifference to underestimating violence. Or, conversely, it can regard the necessity of loss and even abandonment. In a small, private world, once imagined and then realized, or stumbled upon with indifference, there is the imminent ebb of movement, and the distortion of memory. It is a threshold.