ITASCA - Open To Chance

It's fitting that Los Angeles-based guitarist, singer, and songwriter Kayla Cohen, who records and performs as
Itasca, cites Creeley, and "Kore" in particular, as an influence on her enchanting, quietly assured new album Open
to Chance. A hue of emergent classicism colors the stately pace and graceful carriage of these eleven understated,
helical songs, suggesting both the dirt tangled in Persephone's hair as well as the esoteric wordplay and sly
musical tactics of a trickster. With Cohen's gorgeous, moonlit voice, Open to Chance sings out an archaic smile;
it poses that same inscrutable riddle of the maiden.
The idea of chance made manifest in the guise of a traveler appeals to Cohen's symbolist songwriterly
tendencies, which embrace both the arcane (her recurring, veiled references to tarot and the occult) and the
quotidian (the album jacket photos were shot at the Santa Anita racetrack in Pasadena, a crucible of bad luck
for gamblers). Like Creeley's poem, Itasca's ostensibly concrete, rustic songs-populated by chickens, mice, roses,
rain, and pigpens-often pivot on a detail that reveals the limpid observational imagery in fact to be in thrall to
other, sometimes unsettling forces, natural or supernatural

Vinyl release of Itasca - Open To Chance. Released through PARADISE OF BACHELORS and available on LP.