Maria BC – Marathon
On Marathon, ambient musician Maria BC excavates fragile hope from unsettling soundscapes
Maria BC's Marathon lays bare an uncomfortable truth: many of our most cherished memories are rooted in exploitation and climate collapse. The album's title track transforms a childhood memory of a gas station's glowing "M" into a meditation on complicity and longing. Amid dense waves of sludgy guitar the classically trained singer manages to make herself heard, hinting at the resilience required to endure in a world that demands too much. Then the album exhales, shifting from confrontation to contemplation.
What follows is a gentler, but no less affecting suite of slowcore ballads in which Maria BC's vocals carve out pockets of air in otherwise suffocating arrangements. On Safety, their mezzo-soprano sounds weightless, untethered from the Earth as it drifts toward the astral plane, while on Sabotage, they retreat inward, into a haze of slow guitar arpeggiations. At times like this, it's almost as if they were singing to an audience of one. Meanwhile, the restless percussion and haunting zither on tracks like Rare and Port authority give the record a near-physical presence, and reveal the unease quivering beneath Maria BC's poetic lyrics. Ultimately, Marathon is an album about surviving survival itself, and the courage required to simply keep going.
Listen to: Marathon, Safety, Rare