Thomas Morr has always had a special knack for the detailed, meditative Gesamtkunstwerk. Accordingly, Sequoyah Tiger fits effortlessly into the sound of Berlin’s quality Morr Music brand, even without otherwise-typical (for this label) roots in Weilheim or Iceland. The project Sequoyah Tiger is the sole accomplishment of the Verona musician Leila Ghraib, but closed-eyed listeners would be hard-pressed to guess that there were so few people involved. Indeed, Ghraib is like several people in one. She’s one of those impressive over-, cross-, and multi-talents—she sings, dances, produces, films, and draws, and in doing so creates an all-encompassing aesthetic that’s difficult to place in time. It spans and combines the languages of past and future. At times, Ghraib’s friendly, welcoming sound palette recalls coquettish 1960s pop songs (The Beach Boys, The Ronettes, The Everly Brothers); at others, it conjures up the warm (and cool!) krautrock and ambient experiments of Kraftwerk and Brian Eno, or, in the moments of densest complexity and starkest contemporaneity, tips its hat to the multi-layered sonic braiding of Animal Collective or Panda Bear. This enormously exuberant ingenuity, which always occurs within the limits of good taste, is what makes Sequoyah Tiger so interesting—it keeps us awake, challenges us, and puts us at the mercy of enthusiasm.

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