by Roberto Johnson (@_robertojohnson)
In and around the modern day psych and experimental realms, the name Tan Cologne is synonymous with the ethereal. The ghostly moniker belongs to the musical project of Lauren Green and Marissa Macias, two artists whose oeuvre and ideologies are predicated on experimentation and exploration.
Residing in the otherworldly landscapes of Taos, New Mexico, Green and Macias make dream pop that sounds like it comes from another dimension but their work deals in concepts both alien and terrene. They are artists by trade and seekers in spirit, working across several different creative mediums ranging from soundscape design and photography to woodwork and textile configuration. Their intuitiveness for finding patterns in the abstract is engrossed in all of their work and inevitably inhabits the soul of their music.
The band’s debut LP, 2020’s Cave Vaults On the Moon in New Mexico, was rooted in extraterrestrial oddities and earthly wonders. Its songs bordered on paranormal, openly professing an obsession with the strange. Their newest release, Earth Visions Of Water Spaces, out this month on Labrador Records, is further grounded in an elemental ethos while retaining the band’s likeness for entertaining celestial questions. As on their previous showing, they again display a knack for transforming simple phrases into hypnotic mantras and restrained instrumental passages into tempered progressions of mystifying proportion.
On paper, Tan Cologne functions as a self-contained duo yet it could be argued that Earth Visions is actually the work of a three-piece collective comprised of Green, Macias, and the elemental force that serves as the thematic centerpiece for the record: water. Across nine sweeping tracks, the high desert rovers explore water’s essence and ultimate significance in both planetary and spiritual regards. They meditate on its vitality to life, its reshaping of the earth, and the suffering felt in its absence.
Odes to arroyos and litanies for lost oceans serve as tools to excavate histories, real and imagined, personal and universal. The vaporous atmosphere created by the music is one not only to be experienced but inhabited, capturing the meditative qualities of varying watercourses through a spool of slow-building crescendos and repeated refrains that prefer steady trancelike grooves over clearly-defined climaxes.
Some of the album’s most dazzling songs sink their teeth in with quietly infectious choral chants, such as on standout single and closing track “Heretic Porcelain.” “Topaz Wave” follows suit, a moody rocker about being lost in a phosphorescent swell. The soft bash of “Floating Gardens and “Space In The Palms” is equally mesmerizing, the former incorporating lap steel and a twinkling guitar line that evokes the blinding glimmer of still water glistening in the sun. Also worth shouting out is “Orbs,” a lurching seance that pays tribute to cosmic dispatcher and documentarian Dorothy Izatt.
The project’s back leg plunges even further into the aqueous, each song ensconced in a tidal wave of dreamy tones. “Blue Swim” reverberates like the ripples from a splashing stone, while “Shell Grotto” elicits the droning hum of a deep basin, and “Winds Below Water,” a tune inspired by an ancient shark fossil, depicts the romance and ritual of dances occurring beneath the surface of a bygone sea.
No matter from which point you enter its world, Earth Visions Of Water Spaces makes for a lucid listening experience. Its many layers coalesce into a soothing wall of sound, a welcome reprieve of dreamscapes that wash over the mind with the warmth of a familiar ocean, each bout of crashing foam containing multitudes within.