David Allred is a prolific composer and producer based in Portland, Oregon. His new album The Beautiful World captures an enriched, realised understanding of why he composes in the first place. Dedicated to the expression of existential themes such as death, grief, longing and loss, the album’s core theme centres around the suicide of a young girl Lauren, who was a family friend to Allred.

For as long as he could remember, Allred always created music out of a kind of dissociative state which he finds alluringly easy to lapse into. A repetition of a motif is usually where he begins composing. But unlike his previous works, The Beautiful World firmly has one foot in reality and is deeply intertwined with Allred’s relationships, past and present.

For some musicians, a change in instrumentation, theme or learning a new artistic vocabulary helps them to move in a different direction. For Allred, a long period of introspection was more relevant to the development of his practice:

“I find beautiful irony when I consciously disconnect myself from working on music because it gives me more fuel and inspiration to engage in it more meaningfully when I resume. In the past, I used to work and create recklessly without boundaries which led to growth and success but at the cost of occasional disassociation. I would be checked out at times even while working [...] but now that I make music less often, I feel like I'm growing with what I do, and truly living life more. And since I'm getting more out of life, I have more to say. These boundaries have given me greater access to the things that inspire me, along with a peace of mind and the ability to rest when I maintain this balance.”

Through his correspondence with Erased Tapes label head and the album’s producer, Robert Raths, over the past year, he came to realise that everyone has a Lauren in a way – someone they’d lost. Through writing to Raths, Allred was able to draw out this thread from the work and position it more clearly as the central concept to this work. The music doesn’t reflect the chaos of trauma, instead it has a therapeutic quality. It was through this dialogue that Allred was able to create what may be his most cohesive body of work to date.

About this collaboration, Allred says:

"I am infinitely grateful for Robert's patience, persistence and profound attention to detail in the making of this record. He helped me feel effortlessly seen and understood in areas that are conventionally overlooked, collaboratively finding a mindful balance between the heart and the mind through creativity and work.”

The 11 track album unfolds around Oh Lauren, providing the core of the album’s sentiment – how grief returns to us throughout life over and over. Embedded more than halfway through the album, Allred allows listeners to cohabit a meditative space through ambient textures, drones and ballads echoing the vocal sincerity of Arthur Russell, Daniel Johnston and the hypnotic storytelling of Robert Ashley. Allred’s gorgeous melodic sense creates its own universe where the album’s songs live and breathe. He also has an intuitive understanding of the space between each note, and how to manipulate their decay to create otherworldly harmonics which envelop the sonic tapestry.

Compositions like Look and The Beautiful World provide tethers to Allred’s everyday existence. On Look he describes situations as simplistic as ordering a pizza with poignancy and bittersweetness. But lyrically, Allred “leans more abstract” than concrete. “I want to belong in the beautiful world” becomes mantra-like on the album’s title track, followed by Allred’s drifting observations set to a steady drone and percussion that sounds like the click of a Polaroid camera.

The instrumental pieces like Introverts as Leaders and Good Afternoon provide a delicate compliment to Allred’s lyric-focused pieces. The latter’s stuttering, granular-sounding synths pair with funereal organ, which beautifully captures the feelings of longing and loss that the songwriter is driven to communicate. These wordless spaces encompass Allred’s desire to make music that appeals primarily to the heart rather than the head. This new work invites listeners to come to terms with the way things are, what we can’t change – an acceptance of the everyday rather than embracing either pessimism or optimism.

To truly reckon with The Beautiful World’s emotional position, listeners must understand the importance of the figure of Lauren, and the significance she has had throughout Allred’s life. Lauren’s suicide as a child provided the catalyst for Allred’s lifelong grief. But it was death anxiety and grief itself which provided Allred a link to a universal relationship that people have with each other and the world they live in. Impermanence and loss are the driving force behind all of our connections.

The trance-like nature of The Beautiful World perhaps comes from David Allred’s time sense – particularly when it comes to memory and trauma. Time becomes non-linear rather than a straight line – where one can repeat or return to the same themes but older and in a different frame of mind. Grief continues to manifest itself in life and despite personal growth, there will always be moments where the same feeling will manifest itself again. The album encourages listeners to sit with the concept of grief, and Allred is hopeful they can find comfort and learn to process it in a healing way.

The Beautiful World is therefore heavily influenced by Allred’s work in therapy, particularly his relationship to writing music. In the past, Allred would be composing music as a means to dissociate from his life, but the album sees him engaging and connecting more authentically than ever with others and himself. Despite his prolific previous works being made in the company of others, Allred needed to step back from the scenes that he’s worked in to discover what he really wanted to create. Allred concludes: “In the power of love, curiosity, humour, and reconciliation, we give you The Beautiful World.”