LINDA PERHACS
TO RELEASE FIRST ALBUM IN 44 YEARS

'The Soul Of All Natural Things' - First Album Since 1970's Classic 'Parallelograms'

Released March 3rd 2014* on Sufjan Stevens' Asthmatic Kitty Record Label

MOJO MAGAZINE'S'COMEBACK OF 2014. Phil Alexander: 'The release of The Soul of All Natural Things could mark one of the greatest comebacks in modern music'

Read UNCUT's review of Linda's Cecil Sharp House show in December HERE

Linda Perhacs' 1970 album Parallelograms has enjoyed a special classic status and long-eduring afterlife among music fans;  a rediscovered gem that never fades back into obscurity. Perhaps, the American equivalent to Vashti Bunyan's Just Another Diamond Day. Parallelograms is an uncanny mix of Aquarian folk and ethereal, avant-garde treatments, Parallelograms was created in the heart of hippy country, LA's Topanga Canyon, by a dental hygienist  named Linda Perhacs who was inspired by nature and by the cultural revolution going on around her. 'I'm not a drug user,' she says now, still living on Topanga Canyon Boulevard. 'I never was in the 60s and 70s, but I loved those people because they were dealing with energies, and our conversation level would be very deep.

In the internet age, though, obscurity can be discreetly transformed into a kind of niche immortality. As the 21st Century began she learned that Parallelograms had become a cult album. A CD reissue on The Wild Places imprint followed in 2003, but Perhacs' reputation only continued to grow. Devendra Banhart was particularly evangelical, and tempted Perhacs back into a studio in 2007 to provide backing vocals on his reconstruction of the vintage Topanga vibe, Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon.

Disparate and unlikely fans revealed themselves: Swedish death metal group Opeth covered Parallelograms; Daft Punk placed If You Were My Man in their Electroma movie. 'I first bought Parallelograms on vinyl when I was in New York on tour,' remembers Ramona Gonzalez of the LA group Nite Jewel. 'I carried it under my arm to a crowded party, shut the door to the room that had a turntable, turned it on, and laid on the ground. I probably listened to it a dozen times while tears filled my eyes.'

Slowly, Perhacs began making music again. In 2010, she performed live for the very first time, at a tribute show (organised by the internet radio station, Dublab) that connected her to a new generation of LA musicians supernaturally attuned to her vision.

Perhacs fell into auspicious and hip young company, tentatively negotiating a return to musical activity with the help of Gonzalez and Julia Holter. Inspiration came, too, from listening to Francisco, a Milton Nascimento song that Devendra Banhart had passed on to her, and from watching Inside Bjork, a documentary which showed the Icelandic singer escaping from the pressures of performance by sailing up close to a majestic iceberg.

Then came an email from Fernando Perdomo. I get a lot of messages but something said, 'Answer that email right away.'

Perdomo, it transpired, was a skilled musician and producer who'd just moved from Florida into Perhacs' LA neighbourhood. Along with another dedicated and gifted Perhacs fan, Chris Price, the trio began recording the eclipse song, River Of God, and what became the new album's title track, The Soul Of All Natural Things. It's a remarkable follow-up album, one that sustains and extends the aesthetic mission of its 44-year-old predecessor. Julia Holter and Ramona Gonzalez contribute, too, on a set of 12 new songs which Mojo has already called 'a spectrally hypnotic work of prismatic beauty.'

As a consequence The Soul Of All Natural Things, for all its apparent serenity, is also a subtly polemical album, full of exhortations to take a step out of our frantic everyday lives. 'We get too far out of balance and we must find a way to get back to our polestar,' Perhacs says. 'I felt that people needed to be reminded of that. My music isn't just recreational, it's not just entertainment. I have a deeper purpose. My soul is giving itself to the people; I want them to be helped, I want them to be lifted.

Lofty aspirations, perhaps, but they typify this new age of Linda Perhacs' music. 'Linda,' says Sufjan Stevens, who is releasing The Soul Of All Natural Things on his Asthmatic Kitty label, 'has a prophetic voice that speaks beauty and truth with the kind of confidence and hope that has been lost for decades.

'There is nothing more real in music today.'