Decide Which Way The Eyes Are Looking [LP]

Lina Tullgren - Decide Which Way The Eyes Are Looking [LP]

Hello and welcome to Decide Which Way The Eyes Are Looking, the new record by Lina Tullgren. It is a deeply gorgeous intervention, a carefully ornamented dilemma, the most inviting crisis. Made with a host of Los Angeles musicians, Decide exposes Tullgrens daring and trust. Each song is a ring of curious sound: the skip of harp strings, the flutter of woodwinds, the ratchet of percussion, the euphoniums sigh. And at the center of each wreath, Tullgren sings, finding this space between Judee Sill and Sam Jayne. Its a tone that signals weariness, but a weariness hand-in-hand with tenacity. Theres a clarity, a kind of immovability. Lina Tullgrens first record came in 2016, a homemade, under-the-skin set of laments. Subsequent LPs and constant touring cemented Tullgrens reputation as a composer of aaewide-eyed wonder paired with a resonant despair.a 2019s Free Cell showed Tullgren lingering in the margins of their songs, finding places both aloof and spare. Floodgates opened; Tullgren spent the subsequent years exploring deep listening, improvised music, and extended technique. They developed a patience and faith in cooperation that ranged at the far edge of song. Collaborations with Mayo Thompson and Claire Rousay furthered this development. This was not a break with the past for Tullgren, rather it was an opportunity to see how far a song could go. And from that distance, deep in a landscape of drone and tension, Tullgren returned to the bright vulnerability of a lyric and a hook. Weaving together the affective and the radical, Tullgren took the quiet isolation of a shoreline cabin to write the songs that would become Decide Which Way The Eyes Are Looking. For Tullgren, Decide is a culmination of all the work theyve done throughout their life: the melodic, the dense, the confessional, the unknowable. Its also a tribute to collaboration. Describing the sessions as having aaea lot of space and a lot of ease,a Tullgren invited musicians from a vast field of songmaking to play on the recording: Leng Bian, Zach Burba, Luke Csehak, Corey Fogel, Jenny Hirons, Tara Milch, Tim Ramsey, Michael Sachs, Jude Tedaldi, Marta Tiesenga and Ben Varian. Jonny Kosmos backhouse was offered as a cozy, easygoing space for the players to create their parts together, and the record was completed by Tullgren and Luke Csehak together at their Los Angeles home. In Tullgrens words: aaeI feel really strongly that this album is a portrait of the community I found in Los Angeles.a Decide Which Way The Eyes Are Looking is a quiet masterpiece: a generous, memorable journey. It is the result of five years of labor, the product of abandoning the pop song entirely and starting over. Whatever wanderings or doubt fueled it, Decide is also entirely at ease: a record on which Tullgren sings aaeand I know/what to do nowa and aaeI know exactly what to doa in subsequent songs, clear in the revelations this path has given them.