Briana Marela’s All Around Us (Jagjaguwar) is a stunning mural of blurry sonic photographs, a pastiche of memories, friends, lovers, nature, and most of all herself. Aided by producer Alex Somers, Marela has given us an intimate record about reconciling oneself with the world and the world with oneself, a record where organic sounds are treated, stretched, and teased by electronics to create gorgeously ambiguous settings for her fragile, but sharp and powerful, voice.

The biggest, boldest strokes on the record come on the infectious “Friend Tonight,” comprised of elements anyone could recognize: a subtle guitar jangle, keys that surge and push at the highest clouds, and drums that punch and swing with a directness they eschew for most of the record elsewhere. To go with that ethereal melody, the lyrics tell a story about going out in the night and shaking off some unspecified drama in order to relearn how to live in the world. “I can’t face the darkness,” Marela sings, the hook belying a little grin. “Come over, but don’t come back to my bed tonight. I just need a friend tonight.”

That sense of putting pieces back together surfaces again and again. The bedroom disco of “Take Care of Me” uses rickety keyboard beats distorted around the edges and a blanket of keys rising and falling behind waves of a vocal that recalls R&B balladeering mapped onto a thinner voice. Here, a single word like “matters” is elongated into something ecstatic and repeated like a poem’s refrain, hammered home and shot through with glowing hope. “Dani”  is awash in drones and revolving chords that recall an elegy and lyrics that obliquely turn from a warning about “losing herself” into the encouragement of, “You’re strong if you remember.”

All Around Us is meditative, but never monochromatic. Its use of drone and static draws the listener in and make him appreciate the tiniest of details like a quiver of the voice and a long pause on the title track that rotates on the mantra of “everything is now.” But once the listener begins to think he knows what to expect after a couple songs of similarly somnambulistic bliss, Marela delivers the rope-a-dope “Surrender,” the LP’s most ornate track, bursting with life and detail. It is an ecstatic devotional song, but with lyrics like, “I’ll give you all I’ve got” rotating with “Can’t decide what it’s like when we’re together,” at the song’s end, it’s clear she is completely devoted to questioning.

All Around Us has a friendly relationship with music of the last century. Steve Reich feels like the biggest influence, with impressions of his pulse through most of these songs. Paul Simon’s and Suzanne Vega’s deceptively-easy shifting from the immediately personal to the lyrically abstract is a torch picked up for most of these nine songs. Hints of Meredith Monk get full flower in the record’s climactic title track and to an extent in the denouement, “Further.” Marela uses and juxtaposes these elements, but most of all, she uses what she needs to build a framework for her personal voice, bending what’s come before and her technique to exactly what she needs to say.