I have this dream where I’m treading water in the ocean, and it’s like as long as I can tread water, I’ll stay alive. So I conserve my energy, quiet my mind, feel the profound momentum of the waves shifting me around, and tread, tread, tread. I had that dream again last night, falling asleep to The Absent and the Distant.

Much of Corrina Repp’s album is instrumentally sparse – a single, uncomplicated piano or guitar playing simple, pleasing chords. Her voice carries the songs, somber and deliberate and beautiful. This straightforward orchestration and the heaviness of her voice draws an easy line to Cat Power, but it’s not that simple. There’s a darkness in Absent that is, well, absent in Cat Power. It’s even something different than “darkness.”

I can explain this way: When I was eight, I woke up in the middle of the night, calm, expectant, skin electric. In the corner of my room, near the window, I could see the back of a woman in a long nightgown, partly obscured by the curtains. Her hair hung halfway down her back, straight and flat and dark. She turned her head toward me, not out of shock or surprise, but slowly, like she wasn’t sure of what she’d find. And I just watched her turn her head and look at me. Then I closed my eyes again.

This is all by way of saying: I think this album is haunted.

When there is accompaniment, it is strange and fittingly ambient. “I’ll Walk You Out” has a rhythm track that sounds like the sad memory of a backyard fireworks show. “Afloat” has dramatic, delayed, “Chariots of Fire” drums. But the most common accompaniment is Repp herself, echoed out and otherworldly, floating ghostly choruses.

The sum of these trinkets and tinklings over Repp’s dark and hollow-boned voice makes for a strange soundtrack, one in which the main character drowns 10 different times, waking up from the same dream sopping wet and going through life only to drown before the sun sets. And you have to wonder: will they wake up from this one? Think of The Absent and the Distant as riding the line between death and dreams, treading the infinite water that contains them both.

Corrina Repp MySpace Page
Hush Records