The genre-defying, multi-talented Kadhja Bonet has released her debut album today via Fat Possum Records/Fresh Selects. Already enjoying a plethora of critical praise from publications including NPR, The Fader, Gorilla Vs Bear, LA Weekly and others, The Guardian joins in saying: “Hers is phantasmagoric R&B, soul from another time, another place. Another dimension, even.”

iTunes: The Visitor – Kadhja Bonet

The Visitor opens with an awe you’d expect from the golden age of cinema, somewhere between Cinderella and Barbarella, in its half-mythical atmosphere. ‘Earth Birth’ offers keys and choirs science-fictionally echoing down from deep space. This overture fades and Kadhja’s voice – pronounced “kod-ya” – emerges on “Honeycomb” with a timelessness sending listeners scrambling to find her nearest genre. After running through classical, jazz, soul, folk, and even psychedelia, you find it ultimately impossible to comfortably place her.

Bonet’s early and formal training in classical music quarters, where she mastered violin and viola, learned flute and guitar, and gained the sharp compositional talents that frame every note and curve of The Visitor. All writing and arrangement, except for the Jaco Pastorius melody put to her words on ‘Portrait of Tracy’, is entirely of Kadhja’s creation. She plays almost all of the instrumentation herself, including guitar, violin, flute, and the backup vocals that fill up the skies up her music.

Kadhja stays private, if not a little mysterious, about her own life story. She insists that her audience convene with her on imaginative and musical planes, instead of through byword associations with any scene or venue. The Visitor is an opus unpolluted by the mixed advice or overproductions that plague other albums. It plays through like one individual’s lucid dream in what is sometimes an all-too-dreamless musical landscape. Once we hear it, we recognize it as something that’s been harder and harder to find in the last thirty or forty years, though so badly missed. Kadhja has humbly learned from her predecessors while following their signs ever forward.

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