Search Results for:

MARIA BC

Maria BC

Marathon

Maria BC returns with their third studio album, and sophomore Sacred Bones release, 'Marathon'.

Born from a sense of urgency, masochistic determination and endurance, 'Marathon' reflects what it means to keep going whether you’re resisting or just surviving,you’re in it for the long haul. On this record, Maria BC delves into themes of resistance, environmental ruin, personal disruptions and destruction, all entwined in musical grit and drive. Where 2023’s 'Spike Field' felt like one long breath, 'Marathon' is a dynamic exploration of endurance, of pushing forward, resisting, observing and surviving. “For this record I decided to spend less time on production and recording and more time on songwriting,” Maria BC explains. “The result, I think, is more thematically consistent, lyrically speaking, and more concise... I set out to make something more dynamic and varied.”

On a micro level, 'Marathon' dissects our existence how it’s driven by personal ambitions, determination, and our desires to make the most of our life. On a macro level, Maria BC analyzes the destructive, extractive energy systems that drive our world: “machines that, at all costs, will keep running until they run themselves into the ground,” as they describe.

Written and recorded throughout the West Coast, the album is both expansive and immediate, ranging sonically from aerial acoustic songs, to glitchy distorted tracks channeling chaos and disillusionment, all while maintaining a lyrical through line.

Across its thirteen songs 'Marathon' doesn’t shy away from difficult topics, cruelty and complicity, loss and destruction. But it holds out hopefully for connection, intimacy and interference. “Sometimes when I write songs, I imagine the voice that’s singing is a kind of spirit,” they say.


TRACK LISTING

1. Marathon
2. As The Earth Turns
3. Peacemaking
4. Safety
5. Rare
6. Port Authority
7. The Sound
8. Sabotage
9. June
10. Night & Day
11. May This Rain
12. Channels
13. Miami

Maria BC

Spike Field

In the early 1990s, a team of linguists, engineers, anthropologists, and archaeologists were tasked with constructing a type of communication that could transcend time. How might we converse with future civilizations when language may evolve or dissolve entirely? The result yielded the design of spike fields; a strange construction of granite thorns bursting from the earth to alert its viewers to the deadly uninhabitability of nuclear waste disposal sites. For Maria BC (they/them), this state of temporal focus molds the wanderings on their second full length album Spike Field. How do we connect with the weathered shadow of our experience, while envisioning the self a few steps ahead of us? While their debut album Hyaline (2022, Father/Daughter) explored grief and anxiety through a series of character-led accounts, Spike Field recognizes that the past will continue to lurk below the surface until we decide to break through the soil.

Spike Field was recorded in the home of a family friend. The home featured an out-of-tune baby Steinway piano, complete with squeaky hammers and strange, sporadic sounds. The piano is sprinkled throughout the album, and features extensively on opener “Amber,” showcasing Maria BC’s looser, more extensive arrangements. The song flickers with electronic wonder, like a wave seeking out its station, before crashing into the angelic choral introduction of “Watcher”. Strings, plucked guitar and buzzing swells accompany their classically-trained mezzo- soprano voice on “Return to Sender,” a song that focuses on the frustrations and turmoil of being unable to reach a loved one––both physically and emotion-ally.

Spike Field reminds us that despite our best efforts to bury certain aspects of ourselves, they will always lurk beneath the surface. Instead of ignoring the seeds striving to break through, we can point to these places with a curious grace, concocting a language that transcends words to converse with our previous selves. Maria BC pieces together juxtaposing sonic landscapes and oscillating vocals to represent the thread of miscommunication, or the failure of words, that weaves throughout the album, transforming it into a distinct and ever-evolving sonic tongue. If we listen, we might find something new within ourselves

RiYL: Grouper, Big Thief, Marissa Nadler, Cat Power, Juliana Barwick, Mount Eerie, Espers, Diane Cluck, Six Organs, Steven R Smith, Linda Perhacs

TRACK LISTING

1 Amber (3:54)
2 Watcher (3:04)
3 [ A Backlit Door ] (0:52)
4 Haruspex (5:19)
5 Return To Sender (3:21)
6 Tire Iron (3:49)
7 Daydrinker (3:58)
8 Tied (ft. Issei Herr) (4:16)
9 Still (5:13)
10 Lacuna (4:16)
11 Mercury (4:08)
12 Spike Field (6:27) 

Maria BC

Hyaline

‘Hyaline’ is the debut album from Ohio-born, Oakland, CAbased artist and songwriter, Maria BC. Following last year’s debut EP, ‘Devil’s Rain’, which received critical praise from Pitchfork, BBC Radio 6 Music, KEXP and more, Maria recorded ‘Hyaline’ across their untreated Brooklyn apartment in Summer 2021, like a wandering spirit gaining energy from different spaces. Their classically trained mezzosoprano voice soars over raw, ethereal guitars; audio samples from Prospect Park - now almost unrecognizable - settle alongside tender, transformative harmonies.

Mixing together different sessions, tracks recorded directly into their phone and samples collected over the years, Maria BC likens ‘Hyaline’ to a ‘sonic collage’. It’s a project of patience and trusting the process.

‘Hyaline’, the album title, describes something that is clear and translucent like glass, especially a smooth sea. For Maria, songwriting is a stretched blank canvas awaiting the strokes of an exhale, and it’s this slow-moving process that rewards us the ease of a crystalline sky, without forgetting the clouds that may have come before it.

A knife's-edge balance of intimacy and ambiguity, ‘Hyaline’ accesses snapshots of grief, anxiety and wonder through a miscellany of spectres: these are ghost stories, but not as we know them.

TRACK LISTING

No Reason
April
The Only Thing
ROF
Keepsakes
Rerun
***
Betelgeuse
The Big Train
Good Before
Hyaline


Latest Pre-Sales

206 NEW ITEMS

E-newsletter —
Sign up
Back to top