The music of Taos, New Mexico duo of Lauren Green and Marissa Macias, otherwise known as Tan Cologne, has long probed at the intersection of the physical and ethereal, a style established on 2020’s Cave Vaults on the Moon in New Mexico. “Orbiting around the the titular state, the record excavates the physical and metaphysical layers of the specific location,” as we wrote of the album in our review, “digging through strata both natural and supernatural in attempt to represent New Mexico in all its strange, stark beauty.”
Follow-up Earth Visions of Water Spaces continued the exploration, detailing the landscape from the high skies to its subterranean depth in an effort to reconnect to the fundamental energies and rhythms of the landscape. Songs which reached for “innate patterns and cadences just outside of our understanding,” as we wrote, to become “incantations capable of profound transformation. As though the key to reversing our distorted relationship with our home lies right there before us, hidden but all around.”
Even when more recent single ‘Baja’ moved away from New Mexico, the focus of Tan Cologne remained. “Another elliptical exploration of two landscapes,” as we wrote, “focussing not just on the present but also the subliminal remnants of the past and the mysterious forces that bind it all together.” And whether the cryptic imagery of lights beneath the earth and the ground dissolving into dust was apocalyptic or affirming was left open to interpretation. But either way, it tapped into the sublime, transcendent potential etched into the land itself.
Again released via Labrador Records, Tan Cologne’s latest full-length Unknown Beyond represents both a continuation of this style and a broadening of its horizons. Almost literally, in fact, with Green and Macias turning their attention skyward with the same curiosity, openness and longing which has always underpinned their work. Their search is driven by griefs personal, communal and global, the songs written in the wake of bereavement amid a country, indeed a world, on fire in more ways than one. New single and album opener ‘Cool Star’ offers a glimpse at the record’s lush, slow-moving tone. A vibe again ambivalent in its meaning, sounding at once like an otherworldly escape from our terrestrial suffering and some mournful elegy delivered in its aftermath.
Watch the video by Carly Short below:
Unknown Beyond is out soon via Labrador Records and you can pre-order it now from the Tan Cologne Bandcamp page.
