August and June

First Light Records presents August and June, the sophomore full-length from Melbourne-based musician and performer, Mara MacDonald.

On August and June, Mara MacDonald treads intimate ground, picking up fragments of sound and voice and holding them to the light. Sewn together, these fragments (water, doors, breath, pulse) become stories about relationships: their possibility, their awkwardness, their joy, and their grief. Like the relationships they recount, each one of the album's five tracks is the product of collaboration: an object fashioned by dialogue between two perspectives. Guests include pillar of the Australian noise scene, Uboa, and prolific Portland producer, Kaho Matsui.

"Making music has often been a very lonely process for me", Mara tells us. "It can feel like mining a deep cave all alone, so I'm very grateful to anyone who has made it feel open and new again… A lot of those people aren't in my life anymore, for one reason or another, and I miss them very much. A lot of that grief is in the music."

The result of these creative relationships is an album that floats decisively between daydreaming ambience and unflinching dissonance, its delicate fluttering electronics and spacious piano lines punctuated by searing, unsteady noise. It is, like all collaborations, more than the sum of its parts: a hopeful and tender artifact that lives and grows outside the bodies that created it.

August and June will be available on streaming platforms and limited-edition cassette tape on 27/09/24.