Shana Falana is a Kingston, NY-based, experimental, shoegaze/dream pop artist, who has been praised by several publications for a live set that combines live looping of reverb-drenched vocals, pre-recorded backing tracks, shimmering guitar and drums and she pairs with mood-setting visual projections.
Over the past few years, Falana has released her debut solo EP, In The Light in 2011, two Bandcamp-only lo-fi-based releases, Channel and Velvet Pop, and a cassette-only release of her earliest work, Shana Sings Herself To Sleep, which helped raise over $10,000 for her European tour. And she’s been known to record new song ideas on her phone and put them on Soundcloud for her fans. But this Spring will mark the long-anticpiated release of her debut full-length effort, Set Your Lightning Free. Fallen has described the songwriting and recording process behind the album as a deliberate effort to break her own self-professed rules, “I’ve always kept the different sides of my music separate. The ambient ballads, the fuzzed out stuff, they all needed to exist as their own statements,” Falana explains in the press notes. “I would have two or three bands at one time: a sludge rock band; a Bulgarian women’s choir; a pretty, dreamy organ and guitar duo. This is the first record where I’ve combined all of that, sometimes in the course of one song.”
Instead of spending several months in the studio, laboring and fussing over arrangements and takes, Falana along with drummer and collaborator Mike Amari, and producer Dan Goodwin, who has worked with Devo and Kaki King recorded the album in a week with the informal working mantra (and I’m paraphrasing here) of first idea, best idea and don’t look back. And on the forthcoming album’s first single "Heavenstay,” Falana and Amari’s working mantra gives the song a raw, urgency that belies the material’s dreamy and gauzy feel of the material.
Interestingly, the song which is comprised of shimmering guitars and tribal-like drumming paired with Falana’s ethereal vocals bears a resemblance to both My Gold Mask’s Leave Me Midnight and atmospheric 80s New Wave – in particular SIouxsie and the Banshees, Echo and the Bunnymen and others come to mind.
