AFTER 20 YEARS, Corrina Repp is leaving Portland.

She's moving to Richmond, Virginia, on the heels of the release of her new solo album, the stunning and cathartic The Pattern of Electricity. It's a document of sorrow and rebirth, written in the wake of two difficult breakups and a long fallow period in which Repp didn't touch a musical instrument for more than a year.

"I was kind of hobbling around, like half a person," she remembers. "It just dawned on me that I was unhappy. People would be like, 'What are you up to?' and I'd be like, 'Well... what am I up to?'"

Repp had stepped away from performing after her band, Tu Fawning, dissolved after five years, and her personal relationship with bandmate Joe Haege reached its conclusion. "I think a big reason why I couldn't play music was because it was too emotional for me," she says. "I'm really glad that I took the 14 months away from it because it gave me some perspective from which to write—so it wasn't just pure vomit."

In January of last year, Repp picked up her guitar again, carefully and cautiously; she dipped a toe in the waters by auditioning for Tune-Yards as a musician in the live band. "When I didn't get it, I was really devastated," she says. "I had to kind of ask myself, 'Well, why were you excited, why did you really want it, and what are you going to do now?' Obviously I got excited about the notion of playing music with other people, and I think I was just avoiding my own shit—the reality of this thing that I need to be doing."

Her friend Tahni Holt asked her to compose a piece for a dance project, and before long, Repp found herself writing the songs that turned into this new solo album, her first since 2006's The Absent and the Distant. "It was just very fluid. From there I became obsessed with bits and pieces and voice memos and GarageBand tidbits, and just started kind of opening the gates again to writing."

For all the personal pain that engendered it, The Pattern of Electricity is a breathtaking achievement, a raw nerve of an album that explores blunt truths about the nature of relationships. Repp expresses her own frailty, surveys the wreckage, shoulders her share of the blame, and locates an inner resolve that gives the music a remarkable strength. Her voice is multi-tracked over shifting musical landscapes that contain mystery and beauty and unexpected twists of doubt and hope. The album was largely recorded with Peter Broderick at his small setup on the Oregon Coast; they recorded everything with just two microphones—one for Repp's voice, and one for everything else.

"Peter's just so excited and joyful, and he fuckin' loves music," Repp says. "He genuinely gets really excited about stuff, and that's so great to be around, because that feeds into you, which then feeds into him, and it goes back and forth and you have this really inspiring, explosive thing to be around. It's like sitting around this blazing fire together."

Graeme Gibson, Evan Railton, and the Helio Sequence's Brandon Summers also appear on the album, and Railton and Jason Leonard are joining Repp for a handful of live shows, along with a group of singers who come from an informal secular choir that gathers each Sunday at the Beacon Sound record store. These shows are, in a way, Repp's farewell to the city where she's spent her entire adult life. In going through all the upheaval that The Pattern of Electricity documents, Repp came out the other end not sure if she was capable of another serious relationship. But she reconnected with an old flame who lives across the country, and sparks flew. Now she's moving to Virginia to see what comes next.

And what comes next will include, for certain, more music. "I don't want to be as precious about it," says Repp. "Now that I've kind of broken the seal, I want to keep writing and exploring." She intends to make music simply for the joy of it—"and not have it be an emotional necessity."