(2022) Carmen Villain - Only Love from Now On              


Review:
Carmen Villain delivered a major change with 2019’s Both Lines Will Be Blue, an album that brought the gorgeous atmospheres and details of her music’s margins to the forefront. Her subsequent releases for esteemed labels like Longform Editions and Geographic North found her blossoming into the instrumental composer that she maybe was always meant to be, a process that continues on Only Love from Now On. She holds together her fourth album’s blend of dub, kosmiche, fourth world ambient, and granular synthesis with the aural equivalent of world building: On every track, Villain creates rich, vivid environments with her melodies, textures, and everything surrounding them. Love‘s opening track, “Gestures,” is a particularly arresting example. Villain is joined by Arve Henriksen, whose softly insistent trumpet drives the piece forward as much as the mesmerizing chromatic percussion, and longtime collaborator Joanna Scheie Orellana, whose airy flute helps lead the melody in directions that evoke shadow and sunlight, jungle and desert. As on Both Lines Will Be Blue, Villain’s expressive use of space creates fascinating effects. On “Only Love From Now On,” she puts the breathy whoosh of Orellana’s flute up front as a subtle rhythmic texture and lets a wildflower melody play out in the distance — and as that flute melody reaches dizzying heights over a looming sub bass, it expresses the unpredictability of love as much as the rest of the track reflects its comforting warmth. Despite the changes in her music, the feeling of mystery within her work since her debut album Sleeper remains, with pieces as different as the elegantly flowing sci-fi synthscape “Future Memory” and the hovering, shimmering experiments of “Liminal Space” both offering intriguing spaces for listeners to explore. Villain’s ability to add the sounds and moods of nature into her music without losing their freshness is still one of her most appealing strengths, and on “Silueta,” loops of strings and electronics ripple like a breeze through a field of grass. This mix of the natural and the surprising extends to Villain’s career as well — though her path hasn’t been obvious, Only Love from Now On is a beautiful and satisfying culmination of everything she’s done so far.





Track List:
1.Gestures (with Arve Henriksen) 07:38
2.Future Memory 05:02
3.Liminal Space 01:42
4.Only Love from Now On (with Joanna Scheie Orellana) 08:13
5.Subtle Bodies 05:17
6.Silueta 05:54
7.Portals 04:21


Media Report:
Genre: ambient
Country: Norway
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits


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