Review of ELPIS from Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone

This summer, the revered and influential music critic Anthony DeCurtis came to Los Angeles to see me perform, interview me and write this review. Anthony has been a contributing editor to Rolling Stone for over 37 years and I find his perspective on music invaluable, thoughtful and refined.

Thank you Anthony for taking the time and for your passion and enthusiasm for my work. Here is his review:

“That’s the interesting thing about my music,” Christen Lien says. “I’ve played in front of hip-hop audiences, or a Burning Man audience, or a super-bougie art-house audience, and they have the exact same reaction. Older people, younger people. Male, female. I think that what differentiates my audience is that they’re not afraid to think and feel deeply.”

Lien had just completed a startlingly intense afternoon performance in her loft in downtown Los Angeles in front of an invited audience of friends, collaborators and loved ones. She is a classically trained and highly accomplished violist, but that fact establishes only the most basic comprehension of her music. Pushing her viola to the very limits of its expression, she is a creator of soundscapes, roiling aural sculptures that she shapes by looping one sonic texture atop another until her work achieves a denseness that is at once seductive and overwhelming. Despite the absence of words, her pieces have an uncanny literary feel. She had hoped to be a film director for a time – she worked for John Cusack for three years – and regards herself primarily as a storyteller. “Every song has a story,” she says, as she sits and collects herself after the rigors of playing. “I come up with some cool chords, but until there’s a story, I don’t know where to go. But once there is one, then the arrangement comes with a beginning, middle and end.” Her songs are instrumental sagas, sonic journeys that immerse listeners in narratives driven by both feelings and ideas. You emerge from Lien’s music exalted and inspired. It has that powerful an impact. And live performance is her primary means of delivering that impact.

“I call it a show-don’t-tell existence,” she says. “On paper, what I do is not as compelling as when you actually see it. ‘She’s a string player who loops’ doesn’t convey the emotions and intensity of the live show. Performance is like a tightrope that I love walking. There’s no words that could do it justice. I just have to do it.” Her listeners inevitably respond to that intensity with a surprising openness. “At my concerts, there is always somebody crying,” she says. “There are always these emotional breakthroughs happening. There’s a healing in the audience. I create a safe space in which you can purge emotions that are hard to deal with. You can move through the uncomfortable stuff of life.”