Holland-Fricke, Lili & Sean Rogan: Dear Alien (Vinyl LP)

Lili Holland-Fricke and Sean Rogan’s debut album Dear Alien is a constellation of radiant improvised impulses, imagined in lucent fragments of cello, guitar and voice. Spacious, tender and glistening with rich electronic distortion, the record melds a spectrum of processed and natural sound as the artists invite listeners into their dreamlike world of synergetic introspections.

Cultivated through a shared spirit of resourcefulness and play, Dear Alien emerges as an organic meeting place in the compositional output of British-German experimental cellist Lili Holland-Fricke and Manchester-born guitarist and producer Sean Rogan. Having studied their respective instruments at the Royal Northern College of Music, both artists have flourished in eclectic solo and collaborative projects, creating intricate and intimate spheres of sound with a deep appreciation for songwriting and improvisation.

Holland-Fricke’s transition from the classical world to writing her own material, and later vastly expanding her palette with electronics, first converged with Rogan’s distinctive flair for production in 2022 on her EP Birdsong For Breakfast and single ‘Draw On The Walls’. Now, the duo present an album envisioned through true ‘50/50’ collaboration during the summer of 2023, written across two intensive weeks of improvising and experimenting at Rogan’s Greenwich home studio. A convergence of the artists’ sounds and influences, the music was fostered by the idea of making an album with ‘no plan’ and their shared recent discovery of Arthur Russell, to whom the final track is dedicated.

Dear Alien assembles eight compositions that emerged naturally as the duo created sketches with cello and pedals, guitar, tape loops and poetic vocal musings, forming songs that explore themes of waiting, circling back around, and glitchy communication. Moments of drifting through pillowy layers of sound contrast with saturated visions of electronic modification, where the record’s glowing instrumental contours are pushed to the extremes.

The plaintive shades of ‘Half Blue’ and meandering deliberations of ‘Slow Thing’ are teased by the friction of static signals and a sense of ever-mutating sonic mass – a sensibility most acutely realised in ‘Dawning’, where cello-vocoder eruptions grow in magnitude, the absence of sound between them burdened with something sinister and unspoken. As the artists expand on this piece, ‘It’s the sound equivalent of squeezing your eyes shut to shield against the brightness of something you don’t want to see, only to find that each time you open them again the world is not softening but getting more relentlessly overwhelming, to the point of being totally blinding.’

For Holland-Fricke, playing cello with pedals has reframed her relationship with the instrument, particularly in the making of this record: ‘I’d be improvising and Sean would mess around with the pedal settings. Then I’d be in a sound world I’d never been in before, having to adjust how I play to use that sound in a good way. There’s something very wild and uncontrolled about it all, which is a stark contrast to the way I’ve played for most of my life, which is very perfectionistic and within all of the lines. To all of a sudden shove the wildest distortion on it and really extreme delay felt very cathartic.’

Three tracks with lyrics – ‘At First’, ‘Dear Alien’ and ‘Seem Asleep’ – refract the album’s wistful and melancholic colours into poetic imagery and metaphors, ushering in reflections on relationship tensions and someone close feeling unknown, with hints towards wider unsettled feelings about climate change. In the spirit of lyrical improv, ‘Seem Asleep’ compiles lone lines from Holland-Fricke’s journals into a cut-and-paste collage around hopeful patience or futile lingering – either way conjuring a softness that welcomes the hazy ambience of ‘For A. R.’, the final composition which soundscapes the summer days spent making the album. As the artists describe of this track, ‘The music kind of leads somewhere, but then kind of leads nowhere, and just meanders around where it is, content to just be walking in a circle back to where it started".

1. at first
   
2. half blue
   
3. dear alien
   
4. dawning
   
5. slow thing
   
6. worse than before
   
7. seem asleep
   
8. for a.r.