Magana
you are not a morning person (tape edition)
"Hi. Ben from Beanie Tapes here, to tell you all about why we’re re-releasing this extraordinary album.
The story starts in 2016, when Magana released her glorious début Golden Tongue EP. GoldFlakePaint called it “expansive and breathlessly travelled” and we listened to the four tracks over and over, anxiously awaiting the next release. Years passed, and still we waited. Jeni Magaña was busy playing bass on tour with Mitski and Lady Lamb, which is a pretty good excuse for leaving us hanging...
But the shutdown of touring in 2020 finally gave her time to finish and release her first full-length album “you are not a morning person” – a heart-rending and slightly creepy collection of intimate, intricate songs that “might just be one of the finest albums you hear all year” (For The Rabbits). We listened to it obsessively for a few months and lamented the fact that there wasn’t a tape of it. There was only one way to solve that problem, so now we’re on a mission to reintroduce Magana to the world with a limited cassette edition of the album with two exclusive new tracks and brand new artwork.
The album itself is like a fictional memoir in reverse – it starts with an instrumental piece called “The End” then travels back in time over ten impeccably arranged vignettes. The narrator starts the album as a character plagued by dementia at the end of her life and ends up as a naïve child singing about a tragically simplistic and old-fashioned version of love. Magana has a voice that draws you in, and before you know it you’re in her world, a place that is (in her words) “creepy but also adorable and wholesome”.
The 2021 Beanie Tapes release includes two new tracks. “Before” is a woodwind-heavy instrumental piece that neatly rounds off the “life in reverse” album concept. Magana spent much of lockdown in a rabbit hole of synth exploration, and “Bird’s Poem” sees her taking her sound in a more electronic direction. Both tracks are included in the digital version, but the tape itself has an extended intro to Bird’s poem that makes it feel like a proper bonus track on a 90s CD. You’re going to love it." – Ben Walker (Beamie Tapes)
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