L'Rain and the Spiritual in the Secular

Endless Layers of Vocal Harmony

L’Rain, the one-woman studio band concocted by Taja Cheek, makes music that’s a sea of loops: guitar arpeggios, synthesizer burbles, endless layers of vocal harmony. “L’Rain,” her debut album, can sometimes get lost in its own vertiginous swirl. But in tracks like “Stay, Go (Go, Stay),” a jazzy melody and a gorgeous a cappella vocal bridge float to the surface, providing just enough to cling to. (NY Times)

Synchronicity and Catharsis

"Taja Cheek was already recording an album about grief when her mother Lorraine died. “It’s almost like I caused her death in some way—the feeling is absurd, bigger than myself, a premonition,” she told Afropunk. In 2014, Cheek adopted L’Rain as a stage name and has just finally released her self-titled debut as a beautiful, untidy conduit for the absurd synchronicity of her grieving. The album isn’t so much about Lorraine the person as it is about the crater her death imprinted on Cheek...Here and throughout, L’Rain’s songs seem to softly wander and change shape. There isn’t a single track with a straightforward structure, so the nine songs on L’Rain meander to the point of feeling more like a dozen...It’s rarely a pained sadness that pierces through L’Rain, but rather a wistful fog hovering over every moment. The whole thing feels like bouncing around Cheek’s head. She hums, whispers, coos, and chants so hushedly that she renders many of these moments as scattered background noise. Certainly, these things mean something to her, but it can be difficult to find their meaning from the outside. It sounds like she’s recorded this album for herself as a personal offering for the world to try untangling. Of course, all art is meant for this type of prodding. But L’Rain sounds first and foremost like self-therapy, and even from the outside, it’s convincingly cathartic." (Jay Balfour)

Spirituality, Church Music and Wonderment

"All of those influences find their way to the record, as does the spirituality of church music. “I was thinking about gospel music a lot,” Cheek says. “I never went to church, ever, but there’s something about it that seemed like it made sense, even before my mom’s passing.”

Church and spirituality played such an integral role in the creation of L’Rain that Cheek considered shooting a video for an album track depicting a funeral at a Brooklyn church. But as her mother’s health worsened, she put the idea on hold. Sometime later, after her mother’s death, she started thinking about it again. “I was with my dad and we were driving around and we stopped at the same church I had in mind for the video,” Cheek recalls. “I’m like, ‘What are we doing here?’ And my dad says, ‘Oh, it’s just the church we used to go to all the time as kids.’ That also ended up being where my mom’s service was.”

All of L’Rain is imbued with this undercurrent of spirituality; it’s not necessarily a mourning or a lamentation, but a wonderment at the cosmic forces that quietly shape the events we often think are coincidences. It’s a magical record, one that’s equally sad, curious, fascinating, and radiant. Near the end of our conversation, Cheek stops to consider the creative process, and her journey to self-discovery. “The whole project has an eerie spirituality to it,” she decides. “I don’t think I chose it, it just happened to me.”
--Will Schube in Bandcamp Daily

Pitchfork's Review of L'Rain's debut album

The Spiritual in the Secular
appreciating Taja Cheeks "L'Rain" with help from Process Theology

I enjoy listening to Taja Cheek's L'Rain. And, like her, I hear a good bit of spirituality in it: in its sounds and also in the album cover.

The modern idea of “the secular” is partly an invention of European Protestantism, developed to heighten a putative dichotomy between the “religious” and the “secular.” Here the notion of religion means something like Protestant religion with its emphasis on belief, scripture, and individual salvation through faith. But when we study the world’s religions – including African, religions, Afro-Caribbean traditions, and the religions of marginalized peoples, including people of color – we realize that this notion of religion as isolated from the secular is a uniquely white and Protestant idea. To be sure, this idea can be internalized by African Americans. But what was truly happening African church, and the many kinds of music that emerged from it, could not easily be contained within the dichotomy. Scholars recognize that black “religion” is like a river that flows into and from what others might call the secular. It is, at the very least, spiritual even as it is secular. It likewise follows that explorations of spirituality within the ostensibly secular have a particular and special role to play. They highlight the illusion of the dichotomy. So what is “spiritual” in the music of L’Rain? It is the moods communicated in the music itself, lamentation and wonderment, for example, and also the very process of experimentation and mixing things from, and into, fragments. You hear the process in the outcome, that is, in the music of her debut album. And this process of mixing, this openness to novelty, this combining of the many into one is, from the perspective of process theology, likewise spiritual – as spiritual as lamentation and wonderment. It is an ongoing act of the imagination. This ongoing activity is one way that human beings from all walks of life respond to the ongoing lure of a cosmic force, forever connecting things in new way, yet ever holding all that is given in a great love: a love of what was, what is, and what can be. We cannot help but think that Taja Cheek was in touch with this spirit. Her experimental music is part of the outcome, itself an act of faith. And there is something true to black aesthetics in all of this, which is itself a wholesale rejection of sacred-secular divides. It seems to me that Taja Cheek's mother -- Lorraine -- would be very proud.

-- Jay McDaniel, editor of Open Horizons

Spirit in the Dark
A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics

Josef Sorett

"Most of the major black literary and cultural movements of the twentieth century have been understood and interpreted as secular, secularizing and, at times, profane. In this book, Josef Sorett demonstrates that religion was actually a formidable force within these movements, animating and organizing African American literary visions throughout the years between the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts movement of the 1960s. Sorett unveils the contours of a literary history that remained preoccupied with religion even as it was typically understood by authors, readers, and critics alike to be modern and, therefore, secular.

Spirit in the Dark offers an account of the ways in which religion, especially Afro-Protestantism, remained pivotal to the ideas and aspirations of African American literature across much of the twentieth century. From the dawn of the New Negro Renaissance until the ascendance of the Black Arts movement, black writers developed a spiritual grammar for discussing race and art by drawing on terms such as "church" and "spirit" that were part of the landscape and lexicon of American religious history. Sorett demonstrates that religion and spirituality have been key categories for identifying and interpreting what was (or was not) perceived to constitute or contribute to black literature and culture. By examining figures and movements that have typically been cast as "secular," he offers theoretical insights that trouble the boundaries of what counts as "sacred" in scholarship on African American religion and culture. Ultimately, Spirit in the Dark reveals religion to be an essential ingredient, albeit one that was always questioned and contested, in the forging of an African American literary tradition.'

"Sorett unveils the contours of a literary history that remained preoccupied with religion even as it was typically understood by authors, readers, and critics alike to be modern and, therefore, secular. Spirit in the Dark offers an account of the ways in which religion, especially Afro-Protestantism, remained pivotal to the ideas and aspirations of African American literature across much of the twentieth century."--Reading Religion

"Spirit in the Dark is a finely honed compendium of black American writers and the breadth of their religious influences. That black intellectuals and artists were also sometimes dogmatic religious adherents, eclectic spiritualists, and irrepressible agnostics is not an unknown observation, but what these identifications meant for modern black expressive culture has gone mostly unsaid. Until now. A richly historical study, Spirit in the Dark is a valuable resource indeed." --Maurice Wallace, English and Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, University of Virginia

"An exciting and innovative intervention that deftly melds African American religious and cultural studies." --Barbara D. Savage, author of Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion

"In this magisterial book, Josef Sorett takes us into those black literary spaces that have heretofore been described as secular and reveals how those who reside therein imagine the beautiful in light of the religious. From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement, Sorett pushes the boundaries of our understanding of the workings of the 'spirit' and, in doing so, unsettles our understanding of black religion and literature. This SPIRIT moves in this book. It is a must read!" --Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Princeton University

Reviews

"Spirit in the Dark is a richly textured and intellectually sophisticated text that expands on the range and the nature of Black religio-cultural and theological discourse in the US... Sorett deserves all the plaudits he has received for creating such an ambitious and highly intelligent and perceptive piece of work that rewards careful attention and scholarly engagement." -- Anthony G. Reddie (The Methodist Church and University of South Africa)

"Sorett s goal in Spirit in the Dark is to illuminate the entanglements of religion and literature in 20th-century African American history; he makes a strong and persuasive case for the significance of religion to the language that black artists and intellectuals used to talk about race. The book also offers new ways of thinking about the history of secularism by identifying the spirit of Afro-Protestantism embedded in black theories of culture, thereby challenging the notion that American secularism is a uniform phenomenon. The concept of racial aesthetics offers a key term for understanding how African Americans used the arts to ponder the meaning of blackness. In this way Spirit in the Dark does indeed offer a rich set of tools for understanding the power of a work like Moonlight, and should serve as a model for future work attending the long history of the entanglement of religion and art in black life."--Public Books

"In this magisterial book, Josef Sorett takes us into those black literary spaces that have heretofore been described as secular and reveals how those who reside therein imagine the beautiful in light of the religious. From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement, Sorett pushes the boundaries of our understanding of the workings of the 'spirit' and, in doing so, unsettles our understanding of black religion and literature. This SPIRIT moves in this book. It is a must read!" --Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Princeton University

"Even at their most assertively secular, black expressive arts over the last century have riffed on Afro-Protestant church structures that they in turn attenuate, revise, and sustain. In this venturesome book Josef Sorett traces the 'celebratory ambivalence' that animates and infuses African-American cultural production from the Great Migration to the present. Spirit in the Dark is the best single-volume work I know of on the arts and fictions of Afro-Protestant modernity." --Tracy Fessenden, author of Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature