Room40 – 31st March 2026
Room40 announces a new album by the Finnish/Australian award-winning double bassist, vocalist and composer Helen Svoboda, arriving on the 26th June.
The distinctive sonic world of Headwater weaves sixteen threads or ‘earworms’ built around two double basses, two voices, and electronics; heard as singular and combinatory bodies of material. The album forms an abstracted picture of self, rooted in a devolved song form. It can be experienced as a tapestry that blurs the edges of identity; strange, beautiful, evaporative, and fluid, like memory itself.
On revealing the album opener, ‘If" today, Svoboda says “’If’ explores a dream shaped by constant interruptions. The sleeper is caught in a series of jolts, driven by the fear of losing precious hours of consciousness within a fleeting human life. Each disturbance prevents a descent into deeper sleep, yet the body never full awakes.
“The video, directed and filmed by Angus Kirby, captures this state between rest and recurring subconscious thoughts. We filmed this around the corner from my house in Melbourne during, and after, a stunning summer sunset.”
AA
Songs are glued together by extended instrumental practice, improvisation, and strands of Svoboda’s cultural heritage. As a Finnish-born artist who has lived in Australia since the age of five, Svoboda delves into her Nordic background largely through the album’s vocal work, which carries echoes of Finnish folk harmony and traces of invented “Finnish” words, explored in collaboration with Savolainen as the second-voice. Svoboda notes that she does not seek to emulate or replicate this style of music, but has taken and nurtured the seeds of its influence on her musical language into something deeply personal and intuitive.
The instrumental pieces reveal an articulate language, with an expanded approach to the melodic and textural qualities of the double bass. Svoboda’s fascination with timbre is explored with collaborator Jacques Emery through the interplay of the two basses and Robinson’s electronics, extending traditional understandings of how the double bass might typically operate in a chamber context. The result is a different sound-realm entirely – traversing between spaces of lightness and weight, bound by a sense of youthful curiosity.
The ensemble features Helen Svoboda (double bass, voice, composition) with close collaborators Jacques Emery (double bass), Finnish vocalist Selma Savolainen (voice), and Tilman Robinson (electronics, production).
AA
AA
Photo credit: Celeste de Clario
Aural Aggravation 