You don’t always need to understand art in order to appreciate it. I had the privilege to see Briana Marela live years ago at the Lodge Room, opening for Jenny Hval, and it was apparent that the audience did not quite understand or care about what she was laying down. It irked me since they could not be pardoned by the assumption that their allegiance to the headliner superseded respect for the opener since Hval’s music is complementary, if not closely spiritually related, to Marela’s. Yet I can almost now relate to their distracted hesitation. 

It would be a lie to suggest that I’ve been actively keeping up with Marela’s career. I took time away from this blog during and after the pandemic, and now find it difficult to get back into a writing process of any kind. In finding Briana Marela’s newest album, I also felt out of practice in simply sitting and listening to music. Forty minutes feels like so much longer than I remember. To be clear, I was instantly enamored with the twelve songs on My Inner Rest, but have struggled to express why. I don’t feel that I can simply blame my squashed attention span, either; there is a depth to the record that should be urged to the surface. 

My Inner Rest is the seventh LP by the Peruvian-American artist and it is the first she has recorded completely live. Following in the footsteps of music-making pioneers like Imogen Heap and Bjork, Briana Marela essentially invented a new way to record, making items like a hand mirror or a light bulb into playable instruments that she captured in the Mills College concert hall in Oakland. As printed in the Bandcamp liner notes: 

“[Marela] makes use of subtle movements of her body, as well as different gestural mappings using sensors, microprocessors, and training with a neural network to inform her live vocal processing. This allows her the freedom of improvisation within composed parameters to control discrete electronic and sampled sounds.”

The album’s instrumentation exposes the fickle nature of life. Every one of Marela’s movements in the moment corresponds to a specific sound on the record but as a listener, the physicality is completely negated. Not that the process was all that random—the liner notes also mention that some songs took over 30 takes to get right. Still, Marela was literally performing in a medium that was not the intended final product. Trust the process, sure, but also the trust she put in herself was not incidental. 

Self-love is not accidental. And it’s not always consistent, but it’s a necessity. Marela put faith in this album, still questioning the benefit of an artistic career under capitalism in the title track (“will this applause assure me enough?”). A detached melody spins around the stereo, with distortion in the darkest verses and peace when the revolutions return. Though only track four, “My Inner Rest” bucks the narrative already. 

The path is not so straightforward, however. “Selfless,” the opening track that feels like a gentle breeze dutifully keeping a feather aloft, starts with a sincere effort. It has a vaguely positive outlook, even if anxiety does tend to project shadow puppets of bad omens. The feeling is inverted later when the purpose behind the effort becomes inflamed by fury on “Willful or Self-willed” (named so aptly that you can call me Captain Obvious). 

Of the lesser atonal tunes on the album, I grew fond of “Brightest Star” toward the end. Lyrically it was simpler than any of the other tracks over two minutes but it still delivered one of the most important messages of self-confidence. The final interlude, “Suspended,” leads into “Violent Impulse” like artsy, animated typography rolling ahead of a post-credit scene. The album closes without the fanfare of discovering the true meaning of happiness or a cure for depression. Instead, a leaky bucket reminds us that inner work is never over. We can only work on what we can control and react to the rest. 

Though its conclusion meanders, I return to “Value” for a lasting impact. Unique effects squeal the song to life, until Marela’s voice takes the reins. Much of the experience is better described as aural storytelling, where the sounds are not necessarily musical but very expressive. Its message is how I receive Briana Marela’s album as a whole and what I want to remember for my own daily insecurities. “Even if they don’t understand you, there is value in you.”

Briana Marela | buy My Inner Rest | website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | TikTok | YouTube | Spotify | Soundcloud | Bandcamp