BAFTA-nominated composer and producer Lena Raine today releases her much-anticipated debut album for Local Action, Oneknowing.
A multiple award-winning composer, Raine is best known for the soundtrack for last year’s video game Celeste, an break-out indie success story that tackles themes of anxiety, self-examination, depression and more and was considered by many the key indie game of 2018.
The period since Celeste’s release has seen Raine’s reputation reach an all-time high – she won best soundtrack at the prestigious GDC awards, performed with soundtrack legend Hans Zimmer at the opening of the flagship Game Awards and was most recently nominated for her first BAFTA. Although she’s released several non-soundtrack releases, both under her real name and her Kuraine alias, Raine considers Oneknowing her debut artist album – a 10 track set that ranges from distorted paranoia to ambient pop, brought together by the shimmering melodies that make her soundtracks so memorable.
An album that draws from “personal experiences, important places, dreams and the lack of dreams”, Oneknowing’s tracks are also threaded together by Raine’s own vocals, sung in a language unique to the album and manipulated by the software Vocaloid. In Raine’s words, “I have nostalgia for my voice as it sounded when I was younger. I can’t de-age my voice, but I was able to use software and tweak its settings to a point that it has a similar quality to my voice from back then”. At times (‘Tsukuyomi’, ‘Light Rail’) her vocals lean towards traditional pop structures, while on tracks such as ‘Wake Up’, they’re repeated, chant-like, to create a hypnotic effect. As well as vocals and software, Raine plays rhodes piano, zither and various hardware synthesizers on Oneknowing, while Michaela Nachtigall contributes violin and viola to various tracks.
A succinct but expansive record full of detail, Oneknowing represents Raine’s most personal and realised original material yet, while showing a different side to one of the most unique and accomplished composers of the modern era.
Tracklist:
01. Nightmare (Intro)
02. Tsukuyomi
03. A Chance To Rest
04. Light Rail
05. Breath
06. Insomnia
07. Trance State
08. Momodani
09. Wake Up
10. Aurora
