Once dubbed “crypop,” Strangerfamiliar’s sound reaches into both the searing intimacy and experimental artistry of Fever Ray and Kate Bush. A self-taught producer and songwriter, Ilichna Morasky’s project began in Montréal in 2015 and continues after a four-year post-COVID hiatus and subsequent move to Copenhagen. La Pena is Strangerfamiliar’s debut full length album.

She’s dripping.

La Pena is somehow Ilichna Morasky’s debut full-length record under the moniker Strangerfamiliar, yet how could someone so familiar to Montréal’s indie-pop scene be such a stranger? Ha, okay I’ll stop.

I haven’t written in a while so let’s return to this practice as I’m returning to my opening statement, in an obtuse, distracted kind of way. Morasky’s music drips with everything, tout garni: emotion, passion, storytelling, dream retelling, blues lilt, heaviness. I always have trouble describing the feeling of listening to music that escalates and elevates in lightness just as much as it sinks and descends into a thick sadness under its own weight.

How do you do that?

It’s a liquid is what it is. We’re suspended in it, in a viscous solution of Morasky’s multilingual voice clouds, her synth curtains, her languid string ropes, as if it were a murky molasses. At once this music lifts us up, holds us in place even if the placefullness around us is always moving, melting around us, grabbing at us to pull us further into the depths.

My image of this music is just that. Staying in place just long enough to realize that everything around us is always moving. And I’m not sure there’s a better a description of Morasky’s life than that either.

Chilean born, raised in Canada, she upended her life and moved to Copenhagen, Denmark (one month before the COVID-19 pandemic upended all life), where she now resides. This album was recorded at “home,” even if I’m not sure she can even really specify where that exactly is, yet she seems to thrive in those adapted environments. When it comes to being emotionally or spiritually upended, Morasky’s life is full of those wounds too.

Yet, independence, along with all of its discontents, seems to come naturally to Morasky.

Listen to the album’s opening slowburn, “An Organ” here:

What’s more, this is a self-release. I can’t think of anything more independent and empowering than going full solo in the Sisyphean labour of launching an album alone. To readers who aren’t musicians, self-releasing is a statement that says nobody owns these stories but me, this is my pain and my art, and I’m taking them in a bindle along the rail tracks of the unknown.

It’s hard. You lose access to pre-established communities, you go out of pocket, you feel the enormous weight of a silent solitude bearing down on you — it’s you against the world. But you own the brightness too. All the spoils.

These are highly personal songs and they belong in the context of a personal mission, so… fuck yeah self-releasing.

“I’ll keep moving forward / Or at least I will try,” she sings in the album’s melancholic closer, “Chain.” Repeating the word “unbreakable” throughout, supplanting the metaphor of the unbroken chain by issuing this mantra, and letting it sit and simmer as the record starts to disappear over the horizon.

Magnificent.

This is all so steeped in meaning for Morasky.

Self-acceptance can take many forms and can require many moments culminating, to congeal. Hers began in Santiago, Chile, with a visit to a female spiritual healer. Morasky recalls: “circling me, she kept repeating the word ‘pena… pena…’ (‘shame’) and telling me that the sorrow in me was thick like tar although not all mine.”

In describing the meaning of this encounter, she mentions feeling simultaneously damned and seen, leading to an understanding of how where she’s been relates to where she’s going in life. For the first time, clarity, compassion, and courage, are all working together to light that path.

We tend to hold on to so much, and are forced by the world to pursue forward movement even if we aren’t ready. Taking time to reflect and process, or even let the mind wander backwards, can be so helpful when the road ahead requires us to shed that baggage in order to continue. That’s maybe why this record feels sort of like an opening and a closing all at once.

These paradoxical processes are part of the same experience. An action and its inverse. An enduring and an elimination. Perhaps in the wake of grief, trauma, or recovery, the only thing required of us is that we reckon with the impact of a person’s presence in our life as well as the consequences of their absence, with the same compassion.

Here’s one last tune:

Please check out Strangerfamiliar’s gorgeous, haunting full-length record, La Pena, via the link below.

Listen and purchase here, please.