Avant-garde piano licks start off before a finger picked guitar and ambient sounds accompany a tender vocal performance by Nicole Rodriguez. “Quiliting” is used as a metaphor for putting the pieces back together after what you’ve grown comfortable in has fallen apart and you are forced to face who you are. The minimalistic approach to accompanying harmony that fades in and out allowing different textures such as background vocals, piano and guitar to showcase their talents creates for an ever changing layer which helps showcase the message of “Quilting” in a very artistic way. The creative use of delays and filters also helps add to the contemporary sonic quality of “Quilting”. Seriously worth a listen if you’re into songs that can help elevate your existence.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Pearla, the music project of 22-year-old Nicole Rodriguez, sounds like your childhood toys trapped in a trunk in the attic — innocent, familiar, whimsical and at the very same time, tragic. Her songs are compact artifacts of profound, human emotions, playful but evocative, contained but complex. No stranger to nostalgia, Rodriguez cites her late grandfather, musician Jeff Pearl, as the source of her honoring moniker.
The Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter may capture the past, but her methods are nothing less than inventive. Pearla’s dynamic voice delivers stories with a delicate whisper one moment and an unwavering belt the next. While folk builds the bones of her music, Pearla tinkers with stray noises from all edges of the world — Tibetan sheep bells, screaming baboons, lap steels, synths — to relay her hazy, pastel-hued feelings of displacement and wonder. In doing so, she creates a world all her own.
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