Former Dirty Projectors bassist and vocalist Angel Deradoorian has spent the better part of the last five years exploring isolation, in varying degrees of intensity. Her hypnotic 2015 solo debut, The Expanding Flower Planet, sought self-love through independence, declaring herself a “Beautiful Woman” rather than waiting around for someone else to say it. She spent the years that followed in literal seclusion, splitting time between Brooklyn and the woods of upstate New York, working on finding contentment from within. It was on a similarly solitary journey, at a Vipassana (an intensive silence retreat), that she found inspiration for her next album. That record, the mesmerizing and transfixing Find The Sun, transforms her journey of self-discovery into brooding, haunting jazz and spellbinding, propulsive krautrock—like Can by way of Ozzy Osbourne.
Though the blues-y riffs of “Red Den” and the baroque acoustic guitar of “Monk’s Robe” are a gothic stylistic departure from the funky psychedelia of her debut, they’re a natural outgrowth of Deradoorian’s performances with the indie rock supergroup Black Sabbath Cover Band Rehearsals, where she covers the British behemoths with members of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Krallice, Liturgy, and Interpol. The free jazz of “The Illuminator” and the hypnotic rhythms of “Devil’s Market” are an outgrowth of her Vipassana epiphanies, when she felt inspired to bring gong aficionado and percussion Samer Ghadry into the recording process. Her vocals, deep and honeyed, serve as a sort of guided meditation; on “It Was Me,” she outlines her wayward path to self-acceptance in a trance-like monotone. “What do you want to know about meditation?” she intones forebodingly. The product of years of self-actualization, Find The Sun draws a spellbinding path to serenity, one that promises no easy answers, but offers sage premonitions of the darker paths on the way to enlightenment.
