Linda Perhacs
Parallelograms

Close your eyes, force your heart and brain to regress to a pre-infantile state, and imagine the best maternal voice possible, singing you tales, with the infinite sweetness of an angel...

Have you tried...? Good, you're not even close to what you might hear in the tracks of the sole work by this incredible artist. Virtually no information about her biography surfaces, as she made her debut in 1970 by releasing this delightful gem for the small Kapp Records.

"Chimacun Rain" is a subtle intertwining of an acoustic guitar and floating vocal lines that chase each other throughout the song, recreating the harmonies of elves and fairies storytelling in rain-occupied woods; it is psychedelia forged in the finest folk lineage, a translation of the most inspired visions of Tim Buckley to feminine sweetness. In "Paper Mountain Man", she pursues him with sensual firmness and determination, where the acoustic guitar is rough and uncompromising, and the harmonica thin and acidic, while her voice is that of a woman, mature and aware; she no longer needs to emancipate herself... and I don't exaggerate in saying that on this track, artists of the caliber of Patty Smith and Polly Jean Harvey have thoroughly studied all the possible nuances. "Dolphin" is an exercise in ethereal beauty, which carries the demands of peace and love into the dark decade of music, more as a "modus operandi" than a goal to pursue; where our artist deconstructs Joan Baez's melodies, making them skewed and adapting them to a somewhat more ""quirky"" folk, fully achieving this in the following "Call Of The River".

In "Sandy Toes", she draws directly from the hippie counterculture, from which emerge Country Joe & The Fish, Electric Prunes... even certain Byrds; entirely stripped even of the last drop of machismo. In the title track, all this is superbly sublimated and the rarefied psychedelia takes center stage in the piece, halfway between the space-time immersions of Floyd, the resurfacing à la Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, and a faint echo of kraut from the depths of the Black Forest.

"Hey, Who Really Cares" is an interlude of pure folk exercise, a pause introducing the vocal hallucinations of "Moon And Cattails", where the call to Patty Smith becomes even stronger and more incredible, both for the melodies and the nervous blues drawn by the six strings. Flutes embellish the graceful fresco of "Morning Colors" merging into the "folkedelic" splendor of "Porcelain Baked Over Cast Iron Wedding"... and here I hope the title alone says it all. And it closes with "Delicious", where once again, the ethereal beauty of Linda Perhacs' vocal melodies sublimates the sparse stride of her guitar, recalling, very closely here, the cold mornings of the English countryside described by Nick Drake.

Very (too) often overshadowed by the imposing figure of Joni Mitchell, Linda released her work in 1970, a few months after "Ladies Of The Canyon" and a year before "Blue" by her ""rival"", and perhaps the differences between the two works are not entirely coincidental.

And all of this is not fantasy, but the Parallelograms of a splendid artist who decided to disappear shortly after. And as mentioned, the information on her is truly scarce. It seems she recently collaborated on a track with Sufjan Stevens, and one of the many legends circulating tells that after retiring, she opened a small airplane travel agency on one of the Hawaiian islands...