Rachel Lime
Music in search of other worlds.
Rachel Lime’s second album, STORIES, is a collection of fables. Like a mosaic set with various, variegated stones—agates from the shore, limestone from forest soil, a lost gemstone from the bottom of the ocean, perhaps a fossilized shell found in a sea cave—each track is distinct in color, shape, and shine. The opening track, “Wild Raspberries,” is a rescued track from when Lime was 19, composing on GarageBand using her laptop keyboard as a MIDI input. The song is, like all good stories, narrative more than fact. “It’s about the fear and yearning I felt about the woods behind my childhood home, summer dusks when I stared through my window at the dark shadows of the trees,” she says. The lyrics are mystical, figurative: “Follow me / I know what you seek / I will lead you to / Wild raspberries.” Lime hopes the wistful, enigmatic dream logic of the song helps listeners “remember something they’ve forgotten.”
The other tracks on STORIES are similarly a call for listeners to recall half-glimpsed memories, myths, from childhood and beyond. “Secret Garden” references “La Belle Dame sans Merci” by Keats; "Elided" is based on the fantasy/speculative fiction book The Traitor Baru Cormorant; "Water Lily Bloom" is from the imagined perspective of the Lady of Shalott trapped in her castle, watching the world pass her by. This dreamlike quality is not only reflected in the lyrics. Lime has built each song as its own miniature universe. From the sampled traditional Korean pansori vocals on “Jangdan” to the birdsong and breeze that closes the album out on “I Love When Night Falls,” each track on STORIES bristles with the lush flora of a distinct world.
“I wanted to do something different with the visuals of the album,” Lime says. “I made a track list that is also a map for the CD art, with mysterious forests and mountains and ships on the sea. I remember countless of my favorite fantasy series as a kid having these beautiful maps in the beginning of the text, and I wanted something like that for this album.” Lime’s visual art, a map to her fantasy world, shows her dedication to crafting a complete, integrated universe. Similarly, her self-painted album cover depicts her in an ethereal white dress, lit from a sunset behind, holding a mirror that reflects the moon. “I wanted it to look like old school fantasy art, the kind I would see on my favorite books at the library growing up,” says Lime.
Rachel Lime’s first album, A.U., was similarly about make-believe and the dramatic possibilities of not-quite-autobiographical narratives. The title is a nod to multiple meanings—“astronomical units,” the letters for gold on the periodic table, and Alternate Universe as a tag in fanfiction. The lead single, “Voyager 3,” premiered on MPR’s The Current and KEXP, is about the Voyager Golden Record—a message sent in a bottle launched into outer space with Voyager 1 and 2 in 1977 by NASA. “I've always been so moved by this idea of humanity trying to contact Someone Out There,” Lime says. “There’s this quote by sci-fi author Arthur C. Clark that goes: ‘Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.’”
For Bandcamp’s Essential Releases feature, Stephanie Barclay wrote, “On Rachel Lime’s art pop debut A.U., utopian fantasies of interstellar travel and a nostalgic longing for alternative states of being permeate its celestial synth-pop soundscapes. The Minneapolis-based multi-instrumentalist and producer takes her cues from the baroque fantasia of Kate Bush, synthesizing a sense of fantasy and wonder with lush, textural melodrama that takes the listener in myriad, unexpected directions. Taking the POV of a third NASA Golden Record on “Voyager 3,” Lime sends a message in a bottle to the cosmos in the form of a high-sheen, ‘80s-inflected dance track. “Silla,” meanwhile, is an allegorical imagining, à la “Wuthering Heights,” of the legend of Korea’s Queen Seondeok. Incorporating medieval hymns and Korean instrumentation and scales throughout alongside Lime’s dreamy vocals, A.U. is the sound of a new, seemingly realized voice.”
After the release of A.U. in 2021, Lime performed for MPR The Current’s Sounds Like Home, a lockdown-era recording of a live performance. This was followed, in post-vax world, a string of shows in her new home of Brooklyn, NY, at venues including C’mon Everybody, Baby’s All Right, Bowery Electric, Union Pool, Nublu, Purgatory, and more. Rachel Lime’s shows are a transportative experience, with custom-made backdrops of ivy and flowers, and Lime herself playing multiple instruments, from the traditional Korean gayageum and janggu, to flute and keys.
STORIES carries these themes forward: of longing, of fantasy, of the kind of fiction that is all the more real for not being biographically true. However, this album marks a turn for Rachel Lime towards more rhythmic, synth-driven textures, combining the lush orchestration of her earlier work with more dance-forward grooves. It is an album equally at home in a forest, or on the beach, as it is on an (admittedly) explorative, experimental dance floor. Lime says: “It is an album about protagonists who seek pleasure, who are afraid of it, who are intoxicated by it, who grieve the loss of it. I wanted to create an album that situates the listener fully in their body, while still playing with the literary, cerebral themes I explored in my earlier work.”
STORIES was mixed by Brian Tench, (Kate Bush, Hounds of Love, among many others) and mastered by Nicholas Bolton.
