L'Rain

Brooklyn-born and -based experimentalist and multi-instrumentalist Taja Cheek, aka L'Rain, is mapping the enormity of the nature of change. Her forthcoming second album, Fatigue, demands introspection from ready ears with an array of keyboards, synths, and hauntingly delicate vocals that create a genre entirely her own. Cheek has collaborated with some of the most prestigious art institutions and contemporary artists including Naama Tsabar, Kevin Beasley, and Justin Allen. Committed to the experimental value of process as her practice, she blends genres including gospel, jazz, and neo-soul, creating new un-nameable space for herself, while both fracturing and mending expectations of Black women musicians. Refusing the finitude of either/or, L'Rain readily embraces the flexibility both/and provides. She explores the simultaneity of human emotions — the audacity of joy in the wake of grief and disappointment in the face of accomplishment. Her poetic interventions encourage us to listen, laugh, mourn, hum, linger, realize, know, accept, and release who we are, and who and what we can be when we allow change to be a necessary component of — rather than an antithesis to — rest.