Parallelograms

Most songs ask you to follow a story. "Parallelograms" asks you to stand inside a shape. Linda Perhacs wrote and recorded the title track of her 1970 debut as something closer to architecture than narrative, a structure of voices and echoes that turns slowly around the listener rather than marching toward a final line.

That is a strange ambition for a folk song, and it helps explain why this one sat unheard for decades before a new generation of listeners treated it as a lost landmark.

A dental hygienist in Topanga Canyon

Perhacs was born in 1943 and, by the late 1960s, was living in Topanga Canyon, the wooded Los Angeles enclave that had become a refuge for musicians and seekers.^[3] She was not a full-time musician. She worked as a dental hygienist in Beverly Hills and wrote songs in her spare time.^[3]

One of her patients was Leonard Rosenman, an Oscar-winning film composer. He heard one of her demos, liked what he heard, and brought her into a studio to make a record.^[3] The result, released on Kapp Records, was produced by Rosenman, who also contributed arrangement and electronic effects. Session players included the drummer Shelly Manne, and one track even features an amplified shower hose standing in for a horn.^[2]

That detail tells you something about the atmosphere. This was not a standard singer-songwriter session. It was a place where a film composer's taste for texture met a songwriter who was thinking in terms of color, space and movement.

The song as sculpture

Perhacs has been unusually clear about what she was trying to build. She has described the piece as a three-dimensional sound sculpture rather than a linear song.^[1] In a 2004 interview she explained that she wanted the sound itself to travel through space and trace the shapes of the words being sung.^[5]

This is the key to the whole track. The lyric is built from geometric and scientific vocabulary, and the singing is arranged so that those words seem to take physical form around you. Her voice is layered into gentle counterpoint over picked guitar, so that each line arrives from several directions at once.^[1] The words are not simply carried by the music. They are the material the music is shaped from.

After two verses, the song opens into an interlude of ambient noise and spiraling vocals, then returns to the first verse and ends on an unresolved chord.^[1] That return matters. The song does not progress so much as orbit, and the missing resolution leaves the shape open, as if it could keep turning after the tape stops.

Geometry and the natural world

Why a parallelogram? Perhacs has linked the figure to the structure of the DNA molecule, and she has also pointed to a NASA image of a galaxy with a parallelogram shape.^[1] The same form, in other words, turns up at the scale of the cell and at the scale of the cosmos. She stresses repeating patterns and interlocking balances in nature as the thing the song is reaching for.^[1]

Read that way, the song is not abstract in the cold sense. It is a nature song that happens to use the language of mathematics. Where a more conventional folk writer of the era might describe a river or a hillside, Perhacs reaches for the underlying order that river and hillside share with everything else. The geometry is a way of saying that the world is connected, and that the connection can be felt as well as proved.

This fits the rest of the album, which keeps returning to water, weather and living things. The title track is simply the most stripped-down statement of the idea, with the scenery removed and only the pattern left.

Seeing sound

There is also a more personal layer. Perhacs has long described her creative process in visual terms, with sound taking on color and shape in her mind. The song's insistence on form, light and movement reads like an attempt to hand the listener that experience directly.^[5] A listener who does not hear music this way is invited, for about four and a half minutes, to borrow the perspective.^[2]

It is worth noticing how unusual that is as an aim. Much psychedelic music of the period tried to simulate altered consciousness through volume, distortion and excess. Perhacs went the other way, using restraint, soft voices and careful placement. The effect is closer to meditation than to a trip. Nothing is thrown at you. Things simply rearrange themselves around where you are sitting.

A record nobody heard

Perhacs was reportedly disappointed with how the layered vocal effect came out on the 1970 pressing, and preferred the remaster released three decades later.^[1] The ambition ran ahead of the technology, and ahead of the label as well. The album was largely ignored on release, and the lack of promotion discouraged her enough that she went back to dental hygiene.^[2]

The story could have ended there. Instead, a collector-driven revival began in the late 1990s. The Wild Places label reissued the album in 1998, and its founder tracked Perhacs down in 2000.^[3] Further reissues followed in 2003, 2008, 2010 and 2014.^[2] Reviewers began to compare her with Vashti Bunyan, Nick Drake and Joni Mitchell, though one critic noted that her voice was more restrained than Mitchell's.^[4] That same reviewer first heard the title track on a mix compiled by Kieran Hebden of Four Tet.^[4]

The album also found a home in the loose circle of new folk artists then being called New Weird America, and Devendra Banhart, an admirer, later had her sing on one of his records.^[3] Pitchfork's review of the reissue called the title track mindblowing,^[1] and NPR would later describe the original album as full of hallucinatory sculptures of sound woven into psychedelic folk melodies.^[6]

What the arrangement is doing

It helps to listen for the small decisions. The guitar is plain and steady, almost a drone, which gives the voices a fixed floor to move across. Nothing percussive pushes the song forward, so the sense of time comes entirely from the way the vocal lines enter, overlap and fade.

The electronic touches Rosenman contributed are used sparingly, more like a change in air pressure than a feature.^[2] The effect is of a room that quietly changes size while you sit in it, and it is exactly the kind of thing the song's title promises: a figure whose angles stay the same while its position in space keeps changing.

Why it resonates now

Part of the appeal is the sense of discovery. The song sounds as though it came from nowhere, with few obvious ancestors and few imitators. That makes it feel like a private world rather than a product of its moment.

But there is a more lasting reason. In an age of constant noise, "Parallelograms" offers a way of listening that is slow, spatial and patient. It rewards headphones, but it also rewards simply paying attention. The song teaches you how to hear it as you go, and by the end you are listening for placement and pattern in a way you were not at the start.

It also quietly argues that scientific language and emotional language are not opposites. The vocabulary of angles and molecules, in her hands, becomes a way of expressing wonder. Few songs make a technical vocabulary feel this tender.

Other ways to hear it

Not everyone hears the song as a nature meditation. Some listeners take it as a pure sonic experiment, enjoyable for its textures without any need to decode its imagery. The talk of DNA and galaxies, on this view, is a map drawn afterward of a feeling that is really about sound.

Others hear a spiritual or mystical song. The sense of an ordering intelligence behind visible things, and the way the track dissolves into a spiral before reassembling itself, can easily be heard as devotional, even if the language is geometric rather than religious.

A third reading focuses on the circumstances of the artist. A working professional, writing at the margins of her day, built an entire private cosmology and put it on tape. The song becomes a quiet assertion that a person does not need to be a full-time musician to have a complete artistic vision.

There is a practical side to this reading as well. Because the song asks so little of its audience in terms of narrative, it can be returned to many times without wearing thin. Each listen tends to settle on a different strand of the layered vocals, and the shape seems to shift accordingly.

These readings do not conflict. They are different angles on the same figure, which seems fitting.

The shape that stays

"Parallelograms" is a song about pattern, but it is also a song that creates one. Its voices fold into each other, its words become objects, and its ending refuses to close the shape. Perhacs spent decades away from the music business, and the track waited patiently for an audience able to hear what she had built.

It is a rare piece of folk music that feels as though it has more in common with a mobile or a stained glass window than with a story. And like those objects, it changes slightly depending on where you stand and how the light falls.