Stream: Clara-Nova, ‘An Island’

Kevin Bronson on October 13th, 2015

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It’s taken Sydney Wayser a minute to release the first music under her new moniker Clara-Nova, which she adopted in 2013 upon returning to Los Angeles. The French-American singer-songwriter grew up between L.A. and New York City, and spent her summers in Paris — and there’s a strong thread of Euro exotica in her electronica. In her free-spirited first single, “An Island,” cinematic strings collide with clattering percussion as Wayser professes to be OK with being carried, metaphorically, by whatever breeze captures her: “I don’t wanna know / Where I’m gonna go,” she sings in the chorus. The song appears on Clara-Nova’s four-song EP, “The Bronze Age,” which she explains represents the mystical transformation into her new persona, which she says came to her in a dream. “It’s hard to accept change, but when you get to the other side, you can finally acknowledge why you did all the things you did,” she says. In the EP’s case, she collaborated with Shawn Everett (Alabama Shakes, Weezer, Julian Casablancas), whose production is as arresting and at times ethereal as Wayser’s lyrical purging. “With this music, the thing I want to get across is honesty and real human connection,” she says. “There is so much stimulation out there, I know myself to get a little lost in it.”

||| Stream: “An Island”