One of the most striking and enigmatic works to appear on Discreet Music in recent years. There is a long tradition of artists who have tried to set scripture to music and failed magnificently - the failure itself becoming the subject, the wound becoming the work. Carrie DeCunzo Mirande's debut album belongs to this lineage. In the twenty-four days before Christmas 2024, she read the twenty-four chapters of the Book of Luke and attempted to respond in sound. Two piano pieces emerged - one inspired by Luke 6:45 (what overflows from the heart comes out the mouth), another by Luke 1:22 (Zechariah struck mute for doubting the angel Gabriel). She set them aside. The heart knew what the music should say. What came out was flat, useless, wrong.

My Shadow is the document of that impasse - eleven songs that circle the unspeakable, finding grace in the failure to articulate. DeCunzo Mirande weaves together sound poetry, digital synthesis, layered vocals and field recordings into something that feels both ancient and weightless. The album draws from a lineage that runs from Robert Ashley's spoken-word operas through Joan La Barbara's extended vocal techniques to Meredith Monk's ritual incantations - yet filtered through the domestic electronic aesthetics of Félicia Atkinson and the spectral intimacy of Grouper. It remains stubbornly its own thing - private, luminous, resistant to easy categorization.

The label first encountered the Philadelphia-based artist in 2024, when she performed at Longest Night in Gothenburg alongside Arv & Miljö and Christian Mirande. A computer musician, pianist, vocalist, video and installation artist, she studied electronic music at Mills College and political ecology at the University of Vermont. She has released under the names beautywork, Natural Pleasures, and Carrie Ford, on labels including No Rent, Hold, Love is the Law, Sprawl Tapes, and American Damage. Her work explores social and ecological ethics, incorporating visual language and theater into compositional practice.

What DeCunzo Mirande offers here is hope, grief, resignation, desperate bargaining with self and God. The music moves between states - consolation and desolation, speech and silence, the will to communicate and the acceptance of incommunicability. Lose the thread trying to say what's unspeakable. Find grace sealing yourself in what's unknowable.

Written, recorded and mixed at her home in Philadelphia. Mastered by Lasse Marhaug. Edition of 300 copies.