Interview Lael Neale's first 'proper' LP, Acquainted With Night, is an album whose making and themes percolate with isolation. Which makes it an album that feels in tune to recent pandemic history. The 33-year-old American artist has spent a life around music —from her first exposure "in utero at a Grateful Dead concert that my parents went to", to years playing as a singer-songwriter in Los Angeles— but it was only when she came into possession of a four-track tape recorder and an omnichord (essentially the synthesiser equivalent of an autoharp) that she, finally, felt in command of her artistic fate.