Helen Svoboda now shares another glimpse of her forthcoming album, Headwater (out 26th June via Room40), with the mystical ‘Veins’. In collaboration with Finnish vocalist Selma Savolainen, Helen Svoboda delves into her Nordic background in the vocal work on this track and throughout the album, carrying echoes of Finnish folk harmony and traces of invented “Finnish” words with Savolainen as the second voice.
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.
About the track, Helen says, “’Veins’ features the inimitable vocals of Finnish artist Selma Savolainen, as she explores the repeated phrase; ‘The veins I’ve grown from my mother/The tentacles beneath my skin’. This short pondering is injected with raw emotion and melancholic beauty, as if she is bursting out of her younger self.”
Listen to ‘Veins’ here:
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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).
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Photo credit: Celeste de Clario
Aural Aggravation 