Linda Perhacs - Parallelograms (1970)

The story of how this album came about never fails to fascinate me.  Dental hygienist to Hollywood royalty happens to mention to a patient (film composer Leonard Rosenman) that she writes songs; gives him a tape and is excitedly asked to record an album straight away; album vanishes without trace but becomes a cult classic, then records another album after a 44 year gap.  All the while keeping her day job.  I haven't heard the 2014 album, The Soul Of All Natural Things, yet, and I really should sometime; but for now here's the wondrous Parallelograms.

You might be able to guess what kind of album would result from a bucolic Laurel Canyon lifestyle in 1970, but in this case you'd only be part right.  Sure, there's sunny, hazy odes to dolphins, rivers and sandy toes, all of it gorgeous in its own right, but there's other forces at work here too.  Perhacs channeled her synaesthesia into the complex, multi-layered title track, penned late one night on the road by capturing it not in simple words but in geometric shapes.  The undercurrent of strangeness on this album in fact reveals itself within its first two minutes.  After establishing a pastoral scene straight out of the Ladies Of The Canyon playbook, Chimacum Rain twists into a hallucinatory soundscape full of effects-laden xylophone tones, and, to quote the liner notes, "amplified shower hose for horn effects".  Highly, highly recommended.

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