Tag: Ilia Mazia

Hailing from Georgia (as in Eastern Europe not the American south) and now based in Nashville, Kaye and her husband collaborator Irakli Gabriel, are very much on the art house side of Americana, embracing an eclectic range of musical colours on an album informed by political trauma (the war in Ukraine) and personal loss (the death of David Olney, whose final album was a collaboration with Kaye).

As such, with instrumentation that includes cello, mandolin, duduk, horns, accordion and melodica and collaborators from Jerusalem, Croatia and Jamaica, it’s one that requires engaged listening, the opening ‘Cordelia’ (the first of three consecutive Olney co-writes) surging with an indie-pop energy (and Kate Bush hints) on dance beats, taking the character from King Lear (in whose voice it is sung) as a reminder that, while the consequences might be hard, speaking the truth is better than blind loyalty. Appearing later in the running order, arranged for tentative piano backing, King Lear is also the inspiration for the hushed, cello-brushed and vulnerably introspective regret-stained lament ‘Only The Fool Remains’ (“Left with his dreams in chains/Watching the kingdom in flames”).

‘Cross The Water’ is more of a dreamy, synth-brushed ballad on a theme of migration (“Some of us are wanderers some of us are lost/We meet here at the border where we don’t know how to cross…Who knows what is waiting on the other side/We know what we’re leaving but we don’t know what we’ll find”), and is thematically and musically linked to the organ and reverb shaded waltzing shuffle ‘Infinitely Blue’ about choosing to believe in the possibility of a better life.

After that soft shoe serenity, her cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘There Is A War’ come as a punch to the gut contrast, with a distorted and dissonant sound design , her vocals overcast by electronics and percussive effects. Conflict and its cost continue to seed the albums conceptual thread with another cover, a sparse bass-anchored, whisperingly sung reading of Olney’s ‘Soldier Of Misfortune’, the softer tone spilling across into the piano and strings delicacy of ‘For You’ (haunted by Cohen’s ghost), another Olney-cowrite about conflict (“They talk to us of causes/How ours is just and strong/The other side has causes/And they’ve had them all along/But there is no cause in no-man’s land/Only comrades in arms/And the mad eyes of the dying”) that references the WWI butchery at Flanders, the Somme and Passchendaele.

A collaboration with Welsh playwright Hywel John, the spooked, bass burping, minimalistic ‘Familiar’ with its jangled keys is a meditation on impermanence, written following a friend’s death, the title referring to the comfort brought by memories of those gone in such times of sadness, the recording taking its cue from the tradition of Georgian vocal polyphon and ending with a refrain from Georgian folk song ‘Tu Ase Turpa Ikavi’.

Taking a different musical direction, ‘Red Desert’ digs into reggae territory, the stark lyric a commentary on the shattering of modern idealism when it comes down to either conquering or being crushed by the metaphorical desert (“You hit your head against the wall/To find a crack in your humanity/You whisper to remind yourself/Of what you believe/But you fear that hope is just a temporary relief/There are no exits on this highway/You can never have things your way/But you can try/To abandon everything you’ve ever been”).

Are You There? ends on a contemplative note with one more Olney co-write, this time with Kim Richey, ‘Love Is’ being the first song the couple heard him play live and here arranged as a swaying waltz with Ilia Mazia on duduk as it speaks to the enduring wisdom that “love is the one thing that’s worth going after”.

An album that is more about how meaning is found in the questions rather than the answers, an embracing intimacy that unsettles in its shards of grief and loss but soothes with the redemptive balm of having endured and survived.

Mike Davies

Artist’s website: www.ananakaye.com

‘Love Is’ – official video: