Mana

Mana is the International Anthem debut by composer, trombonist and vocalist Kalia Vandever. This new full length carries on the expansive and dazed spirit of their first solo album, We Fell In Turn, while entering a new landscape of spacious songwriting.Vandever’s music has quickly and widely gained traction in the last few years despite the fact that their style has been consistently difficult to pin down, boasting a compositional scope ranging from the cinematic modern jazz of their quartet work to the synthetic, gauze-like droning ambience of their solo material. Mana leans into the expansion of the latter: solo trombone filtered through a well-dialed pedalboard and manipulated live, paired with spare piano à la late-career work of Ryuichi Sakamoto. The electroacoustic interplay simultaneously echoes and transforms the long-note melodicism of Vandever’s melancholic brass work; and the whole sound is emotively augmented with head-on, unambiguous, and deeply personal sung lyrics—a particularly fresh move for the composer. This dexterity has not gone unnoticed, with The Wire asserting, “Vandever has never sounded more assured and in control of their many strengths.”“It was born out of curiosity,” says Vandever of the new record. “Of wanting to explore playing in a solo context, but also wanting to interact with my own sound. I was also asking myself things like ‘how can I do this in a way that feels personal, but different from what I've seen?’ It's allowed me to go deeper into my relationship with the instrument and with sound in general.”A turning point in that development came when Vandever began to get more opportunities to play outside of the context of the jazz world. Some of those opportunities came in the form of playing a part in backing groups for pop stars (Harry Styles) or indie-rock mainstays (Japanese Breakfast), but the true exploration of Vandever’s own sound personality came while performing solo to new audiences unconcerned with genre. In particular, an opening slot on a tour with folksinger Haley Heynderickx seemed to knock something loose. There was, perhaps, less of a feeling that they needed to touch on jazz traditions in order to satisfy some kind of unspoken expectation from the audience—less perceived rigidity and, thus, less shyness about how to present. For Vandever, warming up the stage for Heynderickx and seeing a very different kind of crowd from the stage night after night helped to cement a sort of bravery about sharing a number of more intimate, lyric-centered pieces. “I was considering that they might gravitate more toward words,” says Vandever. “So I thought I could try these songs that I had been developing, that maybe I was feeling a little nervous to share."“When I started opening for Haley, her audiences were just so giving and really open to receiving anything,” they continue. “So I started trying these songs and I feel like the words really resonated with audiences. It felt important to include them on the record.”It’s more than just the words that resonate here. There’s a sonic scope on Mana which tees up a deep world for these lyrics to live in whenever they appear. A full-bodied trombone awash in reverberation and polyphonic pitch-shifting introduces “Hubbard Road,” Mana’s opening track. Vandever’s trusty brass axe rings out with confident warmth and soft power, ascending and descending in register, before being joined by the song’s primary theme—two repeating grand piano triads. It’s a quietly tense musical figure that is slowly unwound by Vandever’s soul-bearing horn improvisations.“Waiting” opens with solo trombone laid deeply in a dense web of cloudy effects, holding a warped mirror to Vandever’s melodic brass call. The two elements vie for position until the halfway mark, when the disorienting tonal wash wins out, soon joined by Vandever’s longing and contemplative high-register vocal work—not dissimilar to the alluring intimacy of Grouper or the obscure swoon of Victorialand era Cocteau Twins.“Murmuray” is a could-be brass reverie, rendered ambient via the foghorn solitude of Vandever’s effect chain savviness. By the 1:30 mark it’s transformed into a droning take on a tune grandma might have hummed, appropriate for the early riser’s first step into the day or the night owl’s weary and quiet walk home.The track’s title is an Ilocono term used to describe waking and being fully awake. “Ilocono is one of three most common languages in the Philippines and was spoken primarily by my maternal grandfather,” says Vandever, who learned the term when their grandmother used it to describe their voice on a phone call. “I'm very close to my grandma on my mom's side. She's the only one in the family who sings, and I grew up listening to her sing Hawaiian folk songs. I feel like her singing encouraged me to discover my voice. She's been an influence of mine for my whole life.”For Vandever, that family