photo by Danielle Wakin
About
Holy Matter is the pseudonym of Leanna Kaiser, a musician and experimental filmmaker living in Los Angeles, CA.
Touted as an "artist's artist", Kaiser found her musical footing in the St. Louis ambient noise and experimental scene in the mid 2000s, crafting songs with bandmate Andy Kahn as the duo Frances With Wolves, performing with acts such as Mount Eerie and Wet Hair and touring the country with their melodic yet harsh sounds. Her debut solo show as Holy Matter found her opening for Weyes Blood at Floating Laboratories. In 2016, Kaiser re-located to Los Angeles to study experimental film at California Institute of the Arts, playing a slew of improvisational ambient shows during her studies.
In 2020, Holy Matter turned her focus to recording a catalog of her more traditional classical guitar-based songs and released her debut singles "Eve's Hollywood" and "Autumn's Envy" on Royal Oakie Records in 2023, while simultaneously collaborating on music videos for the likes of Dean Wareham, Jack Name, Big Search, Allegra Krieger, Papercuts and most recently Jessica Pratt.
Described as having a "golden voice" and citing a wide range of influences and inspirations, her musical output ranges from improvised electric guitar/synthesizer drone loops to ethereal orchestral compositions inspired by medieval fairytales to 1960s pop songs drenched in fingerpicked classical guitar, tambourines and organs, usually adorned with complex harmonies and vocal melodies.
"“Eve’s Hollywood” is the spellbinding debut single from Holy Matter, the pseudonym of experimental filmmaker and songwriter living in Los Angeles Leanna Kaiser who introduces their evocative fairground folk pop with an impressive start. "
"Again released via Royal Oakie, the song dials back some of the smoky atmosphere for a more spacious yet no less atmospheric sound... the song plays less like a dancehall ballad than one delivered within the shadowed under canopy of the woods in fall...
The result occupies the liminal space between the real, emotional and spiritual, as though through loss and introspection, one can lead themselves towards uncanny places. "
"From the very moment the percussive interplay on this song begins, this feels like being drawn back to some half-imagined, fading American dream.
Wishing Well is a suitably nostalgic, dreamy psyche-pop experiment. That rhythm, played in part on a rescued 1960s Maestro Rhythm Jester drum machine, adds a surreal, almost sleazy ambience to proceedings; it makes sense when listening to this that Kaiser imagined this song playing in ‘a dingy room over some crappy 70s restaurant speakers.’ There is a sort of faded sadness to the kaleidoscopic, narcotic haze that permeates- that Farfisa adding further to the feeling of sun-dappled humidity, ensnared as it is by that serpentine bass that drives the song forward. It makes perfect sense that L.A was the place from which this song came to life. But this isn’t all queasy, corrupted glamour – there is a real sense of beauty here too; vocally in particular Leanna Kaiser builds trance-like layers of harmony that do indeed feel like a holy matter.
There is an almost metaphysical clarity to this song’s conception, and the ‘burnt orange tropicalia vibe’ that Laiser sought when crafting this recording has most certainly been achieved. It makes sense that she would describe this idea in visual terms; through a film-maker’s lens, she has crafted in this song an image-rich collage of sounds that really does paint pictures in the mind... What does feel right though, is the way this song seems to shimmer in front of you – a heat-haze turned into song. ”