Plane Fact

New York & London · b. 2003 & 2005 · FARA Records

Plane Fact is Zay Mercer and Selah — an American and a Briton, one rapped and one sung, meeting in the middle of the same song. He diagnoses; she announces. He tells you what the cage is; she tells you it's open. They don't sing together until the bridge: four and a half minutes of alternating, then one line in unison. That's the structure of the record and the structure of the act — two different kinds of truth, held apart on purpose until they're earned. Equal billing, never one featuring the other.

Zay Mercer (Isaiah Mercer, b. 13 March 2003) is from New York and splits his time between there and London. He was a bright public-school kid and, in his own account, that was precisely the problem: he was excellent at sitting still and giving the wanted answer, and it took him until nineteen to work out he'd been praised for twelve years mostly for compliance. He isn't bitter at the teachers — most were doing their best inside a room they didn't design — what he's angry at is the design. Battle rap first, then books, to roughly equal effect. What turned him was reading John 1 literally rather than poetically: if the universe was spoken, and we're made in the image of the one who spoke it, what exactly is happening when we open our mouths? He's built a career on not being able to shake it. Close-mic, dense, conversational, and never shouting — he says the moment a rapper starts shouting, the listener stops having to think. Quiet, exacting, unshakeable.

Selah (b. 20 January 2005) is from London and has been singing in front of people since she was small enough to be lifted onto a chair. Her name appears about seventy times in the Psalms and nobody is certain what it means — best guess, a pause, a lift, a breath between lines. She sings the pre-choruses. Her mother says this wasn't planned. The formative memory isn't church, though: at fourteen she listened to an adult woman she loved describe herself, casually and without emotion, in language that was plainly not her own — somebody had said it to her first, decades earlier, and she'd simply kept repeating it. Selah says it rearranged something permanently. A warm, open, soaring voice and emphatically not a hook singer: she carries the whole hopeful half of the record, the strings enter with her every time, and she'd rather hold one note than decorate eight. Warm, blunt, certain.