We’re back ! Welcome to the new season of MailTape, we have a goooood feeling about this one ;)
We welcome special guest, Magana, this morning to open the season ! Based in Los Angeles, Magana has released solo albums and works since 2016, starting with her acclaimed EP, Golden Tongue. The multi-instrumentalist also tours the world as part of artist Mitski’s band. This year was a busy one for Magana, as she has released two major albums, Teeth and Dreams, and is working on another release already :)
Magana’s work treads from acoustic songwriting to punk folk to experimental ambient, and the artist has a particularly tuned ear for interesting sounds. In her discography, each sortie hints at the next, as she leans into new techniques and sound experiments successively. Her latest album, Dreams, is a patchwork of her acoustic singer-songwriting with brushes of ambient investigations and creative experiments with voice-overs.
Magana’s selection
Gia Margaret - Body
Magana: “Very often these days I’m looking for music to soothe my frayed edges. This song takes snippets of a lecture from Alan Watts called “Overcome Social Anxiety” and surrounds it with beautifully simple music. It conveys just enough emotion to make me feel understood, but not to drag me in any particular direction. I think this song is more about standing still than transporting me somewhere, and I appreciate that.”
Tele Novella - Eggs in One Basket
Magana: “I forget how I found this. I believe a random instagram post caught my attention, and I downloaded the record to listen to in the car. When I got to this song I just put it on repeat. It’s a perfect mix of things I love: it’s cheeky, fun, but sort of dark. I love the instrumentation and the vibe. I think the vocals are so great.”
Trust Fund, Ex-Vöid - animals in war
Magana: “Trust Fund opened for Mitski on some acoustic shows, and the first time I heard this song was live. It snagged on something in my brain and I couldn’t get it out of my head. I was nervous when I went to listen to the recording because often the stripped down live version of something is not what you’ll hear when they have a chance to get to the studio. But this was perfectly complementary to the live version.”
MailTape’s selection
Magana - 565 Please
Sarah: “Reflecting on this latest album, Dreams, Magana described how she held onto several tracks “without a home” following her covid confinement recordings. They felt out of place on other projects like the Teeth release, but with Dreams, her many recordings of water, bird noises, and synthetic ambient sounds find the belonging Magana was looking for, with the space and meditation necessary to properly appreciate them. Dreams aptly features several voice-recordings of Magana’s dreams compiled from a several-month period, and her spoken memories of the surreal sleep-world often open a particularly abstract and suspended feeling within the album. Experimentations with distortion and vocoder effects add to this sensation, but also parallel our feelings of chasing the details of our dreams when we wake up. The recounting recordings start to dissipate before our ears, another illustration of the space between sense and nonsense. Because of this emphasis on dreams, Magana’s later tracks which focus on ambient recordings from “actual” reality take on a refreshed, otherworldly energy. 565 Please synthesizes a restaurant’s queue announcement, but its rhythmic reworking and placement between dream tracks present it as part of the sleep-world. Listening to the album in transitory spaces — especially the subway — I found that Magana’s attention to the many disregarded sounds in our ambient world re-enchanted these noises into something deserving of our intentional attention.”
Peel Dream Magazine - R.I.P. (Running in Place)
Sarah: “Off the September release from Peel Dream Magazine, Rose Main Reading Room. The album is a wonder to listen through - especially with a pair of headphones :) This was my favorite track from the release (along with the opening song, Dawn); Joseph Stevens’s vocals fall like soft and soothing whispers, guiding the melting of this horn section and the bounding of its background vocals.”
Magana - Apnea
Sarah: “A pocket of synthwork meditation in the Dreams album :) The release processes heavier themes of anxiety and stress, but musical moments like this one offer a cradling. Here Magana describes that the ambient synthwork serves as “an acceptance” for the more intense moments in the album. This track in particular follows the structure of a breathing exercise Magana would use to relieve tension on tour, now a moment of ambient meditation and pause within the album :)“
Magic Tuber Stringband - Days of Longing
Sarah: “Ultimately, I am obsessed with Magic Tuber Stringband and their project — they are both preserving and breathing new life into Appalachian traditional folk music. Each release is deeply creative, and in this track there is so much to love (and not just the singing saw). The fiddle’s swooping notes are ear-catching and rhythmic at once, and the alternation between the rhythm section’s picking harmonies and dissonances are intricate and gorgeous. The slow spiraling down of melody toward the track’s end seems like an unspooling of sound. But then, just as we exhale too, the winding picks up speed again, inhaling, inhaling… gone.”
Thank you for tuning into MailTape for our season’s opening episode, we’re excited for what this year will bring and we hope that you are too :) As always, we thank all of you loyal listeners for tuning into MailTape for your Sunday music discoveries ! Your support through all these years means so much to us :,) A million thanks to Camille Célestin for this gorgeous illustration and to our dear, wonderful guest Magana for joining us. Happy Sunday to you :))
