A little over a decade ago, a song called Chimacum Rain popped up on blog posts and compilations. A wistful ballad with the unforgettable line “I’m spacing out, I’m seeing silences between leaves”, it features a woman’s gossamer-light voice, multitracked into a vortex of sound, gently lulling words about constant rain over an acoustic guitar. The song was by Linda Perhacs, who released one album, 1970’s Parallelograms, before disappearing without trace.
The story might have stopped there had not a 2003 reissue of Parallelograms revealed it to be a bizarre, brilliant piece of delicate chamber-folk, filled with evocative nature imagery and a beguiling, otherworldly quality. Daft Punk put one of its songs, the lamenting If You Were My Man, on the soundtrack to