Linda Perhacs

Topanga Canyon

Linda Jeanne Arnold was born on September 21, 1943 in Santa Monica, California, and grew up in Mill Valley. She attended the University of Southern California on a scholarship and worked as a dental hygienist in a Beverly Hills periodontal office. In the late 1960s she moved to Topanga Canyon, renting a house around 1965 and later buying it, and wrote every song on Parallelograms there. She describes a synesthesia that has shaped her work since childhood, visual music in which songs are drawn as scrolls and colors, and she studied the writings of Paramahansa Yogananda at the Self-Realization facility in Los Angeles. In a 2008 PopMatters interview she said drugs played no role in her creativity.

One of her dental patients was the Oscar-winning film composer Leonard Rosenman, who heard a demo in 1969 or 1970; the title song convinced him to make a full album.

Parallelograms and the long silence

Parallelograms came out in 1970 on Kapp, a Universal label, with Rosenman producing. It got little promotion and a poor pressing, and Perhacs went back to dentistry and, by her own account, threw away her copy. She says Kapp resequenced the songs against her wishes and ignored a request for a new pressing. It was reissued by Michael Piper of The Wild Places in 1998, with an expanded CD and double LP in 2003 from her own tapes, then by Sunbeam in 2008, with an unreleased 1978 song and a 2005 BBC interview, and by Mexican Summer and Sundazed in 2010. Four Tet included the title track on his Late Night Tales compilation in 2004, and Devendra Banhart helped renew interest; she sang backing vocals on his album Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon in 2007.

On October 7, 2009 she gave her first public performance, Linda Perhacs and Friends, at REDCAT in Los Angeles, which led to collaborations with Julia Holter and Ramona Gonzalez. Her second album, The Soul of All Natural Things, came out in 2014 on Sufjan Stevens's label Asthmatic Kitty, and I'm a Harmony followed on Omnivore on September 22, 2017, with guests including Devendra Banhart, Mark Pritchard, Julia Holter and Nels Cline. A first European tour opened at the Kantine am Berghain in Berlin in November 2013. Her singing is also on Mark Pritchard's "You Wash My Soul" from 2016.

Samples and legacy

"Chimacum Rain" was sampled by Prefuse 73 on Surrounded by Silence (2005) and by Jadakiss on "Rain" in 2015, "Hey, Who Really Cares" by Lowkey in 2009, and "If You Were My Man" appears on the soundtrack of Daft Punk's Electroma (2007). Wikipedia places her among the rediscoveries of the New Weird America moment. Reviewers rated Parallelograms highly: AllMusic four and a half stars, Pitchfork 8.6, Uncut five stars and Tiny Mix Tapes five out of five.