Isabelle Thorn

Isabelle Thorn is a singer and multi-instrumentalist who most often records and performs under the name Dear Laika. After quietly self-releasing music online for five years, she released her latest album "Pluperfect Mind" in 2021 on NNA Tapes and Memorials of Distinction to acclaim from publications including Pitchfork and The Wire. The suite of songs on "Pluperfect Mind" is ambitiously mercurial, its rhythms ever shifting, its harmonies contorting as the pieces metamorphose from delicate chamber pop and dense choral writing to brutally manipulated string ensembles and finally into a blissful ambient oblivion. She draws equally from classical composers of the past eight centuries and electronic sound artists of our current one, blending the organic and digital as she meditates on dis- and reconnection and the fluidity of time and identity.

She currently teaches piano and also plays high-strung guitar and sings in Kiran Leonard's Trespass on Foot Group. Other than that, she tends to keep to herself.