Taja Cheek is walking through time. Facing the bustling intersection of Saint Marks and Nostrand Avenues in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, she points towards the former location of the Continental jazz club, which her grandfather owned in the 1950s. It’s walking distance from the apartment where Cheek has lived for the better part of a decade, and where she once booked her own basement shows, featuring the likes of TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone and NYC noise fixture Dreamcrusher. And it’s not far from where Cheek grew up further down Eastern Parkway, practicing Debussy on piano when she wasn’t taking in the city’s sounds—jazz on the radio, Carribean music on the streets, and ’90s rap and R&B in the air. “That’s such a big part of the music I know and that matters to me: the music I absorbed just from being around it,” she says. “I have all these memories of playing Double Dutch on the street and hearing music playing from cars.”
This unique confluence of environment and craft can be heard in Cheek’s work now. Since 2015, the multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and vocalist has imagined a cascading vision of experimental music under the moniker L’Rain. Her uncanny soundscapes collage elements of jazz, R&B, psych, soul, drone, and beyond with buoyant melodies and raw field recordings, forming her own enveloping mix of avant-pop and music concrète. The effect can be delightfully bewildering, fractured and nonlinear, an ever-emerging sound of process.
Her second album, Fatigue, is a culmination of her eclectic ethos. The songs amplify Cheek’s poised singing and bring more definition to each instrument—she plays guitar, bass, synth, keyboards, piano, percussion, and airhorn—while also weaving in threads from no less than 20 collaborators. The glitching blaze of opener “Fly, Die” features a monologue from New York singer-songwriter Quinton Brock asking, “What have you done to change?” and the weight of this question charges each shapeshifting stitch of Fatigue. The record’s fragmented form seems to reflect how personal and social change are ongoing. “It’s not like all of a sudden you go, ‘And now I have changed’ or ‘Now this thing about society has been fixed,’” Cheek says. “I’m counting myself in this change process in a big way, too.”
After strolling past another Crown Heights home for jazz, the long-running Sistas’ Place, Cheek and I head to nearby Brower Park. An enthusiastic and self-effacing person, Cheek laughs between almost every carefully articulated idea she shares. For the past five and a half years, she has also worked at contemporary art institution MoMA PS1, where she’s currently Associate Curator, steering the committee for the vanguard Warm Up series and organizing events like New Age pioneer Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s first-ever U.S. performance, in 2019. Cheek says she thinks through sounds in shapes, and it’s clear that she wants her own music to form a question mark—to remain uncategorizable.
Her inspirations include the ecstatic gospel singing of Twinkie Clark, the poet Amiri Baraka, and ’90s R&B stars like Coko and Brandy (particularly the latter’s ambient interludes). Spun through her kaleidoscopic internal logic, the feeling of Fatigue is one of multiplicity—the music is deconstructed but also flowing, heavy but balmlike, processing both pain and healing. This complexity extends to Fatigue’s field recordings, which range from a pastor’s bracing rendition of Rev. Paul Jones’ “I Won’t Complain” at a funeral Cheek attended, to a joyful hand game she invented in the studio, to an 18-second snatch of her former roommate Leila passionately belting out an improvised tune. With her circle of collaborators, which Cheek assembled to help combat her own shyness—she calls herself “a parody of a Cancer in every way”—the sound is decidedly nonhierarchical, meant “to feel like everything is there together.”
As a teenager in the 2000s, Cheek’s curiosity about alternative music was sparked when she stumbled across her dad’s Breeders and early Common CDs in the basement. It was in that same room that her father, who once worked for the early rap label Select Records, filmed a set of Learn How to Scratch! VHS tapes featuring hip-hop legends Red Alert, Spinderella, and DJ Clark Kent not long before Cheek was born.
Finding her own path, Cheek taught herself bass, and her high school musical pursuits included an Iron Maiden cover band as well as a harmony-driven project inspired by Animal Collective. She went on to study music at Yale before ultimately switching to American Studies, but these were still musically mind-expanding years. Cheek spent most of her time at the radio station, WYBC, where she was music director, booked shows, and found a sense of self-determination. “It completely altered my life,” she says. “Those were some of the first moments where I felt like I was finding a broader music community.”
After graduating a decade ago, she returned to New York, pursuing curatorial work and continuing to play in bands. She began to assemble what she called a secret “journal of songs” on SoundCloud, posting hundreds of fragments—some dating back to her high school years—that would form the basis of her collages in L’Rain.
In 2016, amid work on her debut, Cheek lost her mother, Lorraine, who became the project’s namesake. A public school teacher for over 30 years, Cheek’s mother was among those who had encouraged her to make solo music. Cheek had already been processing kinds of loss while making her self-titled album, which features her cursive L’Rain tattoo on its cover, but the 2017 record became a literal expression of her grief. Her mom’s spirit is also inside Fatigue: On “Find It,” Cheek turns the lyrics “My mother told me/Make a way out of no way” into a looped mantra that submerges, midway through, into the sublime collective surge of an ensemble.
There are many moments like this on Fatigue, where in lieu of neatly resolved feelings or musical passages, the songs induce bemused awe. Or as Cheek puts it: “I hope it’s a feeling of, Oh, what is this?”
Taja Cheek: I don’t think linearly at all. I have this interest in loops and I think that comes from spending a lot of time alone in my life. I am an only child, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, and rethinking, thinking of alternatives—there’s something really circular about the way I think through and do things. I’ve always thought about music as this layering process. The music I love the most is complicated, but you wouldn’t really know it.
It’s very much tied to Blackness and woman-ness, in a lot of ways. I feel like I’m hyper-aware of how marketing and packaging happens for Black people and women and Black women, and all of the intersections. I’m really distrustful of it. And fearful of it in a way. I like feeling a sense of agency in how those stories are told and making things not as neatly packaged—and showing some of the nuance in all of those identities through music feels like the most immediate way I can do it.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what’s considered experimental, and about experimental music as a genre and what’s left out of that. I’m mostly thinking about R&B and hip-hop, which are such inherently experimental genres. And I was thinking about this while watching Summer of Soul [Questlove’s new documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival]. A lot of those musicians were saying, “We’re not quite blues, we’re not quite gospel, we’re not quite this,” and I don’t think anyone would necessarily think of 5th Dimension or the Staples Singers as experimenting with sounds, but they were. This is something a lot of Black musicians have felt throughout time.
Any time I’m writing, if something ends up feeling too much like one thing, I’ll try to find another way. I want to challenge myself first and foremost, to try to surprise myself, but I also try to challenge listeners, critics, and the industry: What are you going to do with this? Where does this fit in? I think about Nina Simone a lot in this respect. She was so good at thinking that through in real time and was no-bullshit about it in a way I admire. Nina was didactic but clever, which is a cool line to toe—telling people, but making them figure it out, too.
It was always my inclination, and it took me a while to understand why, or what it was about certain bands that was interesting to me. Those early Animal Collective records were really formative. It was cool to see people who were freaks, wearing masks at their shows, just confusing people, but also reaching a lot of people at the same time. There’s something about outsiders that is interesting to me and feels relatable. There are a lot of ways in which I’m definitely not an outsider, but something deep within me really feels like one.
Yeah. I’m interested in the weeds in the cement, how strange ideas can reach a lot of people by accident or on purpose. That’s something I’m really conscious of: thinking about the way culture is shaped by people who are working and doing weird things, and it somehow filters out and becomes normalized. And thinking about what that means for an internal politic in a way, too: trying to understand and grapple with radical ideas and trying to fit them into my own life in ways that make sense, and are also complicated and hard.
I was reading this anthology of Maya Angelou poems that I was given as a kid, and it made the album make way more sense to me. Something about that poem reminds me of this circular process of figuring out who you are and trying not to repeat mistakes, and it’s very bodily, in a way that I feel like making my music feels. It’s this entanglement of body parts, and some of it’s very messy and collaged. It just all clicked, and I became extremely obsessed with this poem.
I used to dance really seriously at a pre-professional school, Alvin Ailey. At each level you learn a new thing in addition to ballet, and in the earlier levels, you take miming lessons. As a kid, it was about understanding how to move your body, or how to convey information to people without telling them, with your face and with your body. I actually used to not talk during my shows. I would try to get people to do things by gesturing to them. I also used to teach at a clown camp in high school; I’ve become more interested in clowns lately.
I kind of toy around with intimacy, where I’m like, “This is an intimate thing, and I’ll give you a little bit of it.” But some of it is just for me. Sometimes with relationships there are boundaries of what people will let you into. I was also thinking of me with an audience, where I’m like, “Here’s some really intense, personal things that I’m going to talk to you about—I’m not really going to talk to you about them, but you’ll get the feeling.”
What I think of as the L’Rain sound is the mix of really hi-fi recordings and really lo-fi recordings, where I’m like, “What if you just compress the sound of me crumbling up plastic?” A lot of it is me with shitty or broken equipment, or using my iPhone microphone for vocals because I like the homespun sound of it. And then also going into professional studios and getting a really clean drum sound. Sometimes it will be all of those things in one song.
I worry sometimes that my music comes off as just intense. But in my mind, a lot of the wordplay and the weird moments like the air horns in the first track—that’s funny to me. Every time I hear them, I kind of laugh. We were joking around as we put it together.
I was thinking about the ways play shaped me, too. I used to play Double Dutch a lot, and my mom later told me that she was insistent that I learned how, because she knew I was shy and she didn’t think I would make any friends. In the studio, I was thinking about ways that play can improve your life, and I was like, “I’ll just make up a hand game, because that’s something I used to do when I was a kid.”
It’s a sense of balance, in a way. When I’m putting stuff together, that’s kind of what anchors it all.
Yeah, actually. I think it is. Lately I feel like I’m moving slower and trying to listen to my body, and I can’t respond to everything. I’m balancing my own needs and my own stimuli. That’s how I stop feeling tired. And with my music, it’s like, “Here’s a little bit of this R&B thing that I really like, or a little bit of this spiritual jazz thing that I really like, and a little bit of this thing that’s just me”—and not too much of any one thing, but enough to make it its own.
If my music does nothing else, I want people to feel like they’re hearing something new. And I know nothing is new—everything I’m doing is inspired by so many other people—but I’m trying to find a sense of newness, or wonder.
