Sova – Quarry

A chosen name is a powerful thing, a signal of conviction, courage, and intent. For an artist who has been known professionally under a different name, the act of changing public identity carries an element of risk—will your audience continue to follow and support you? But for Sova, a respected artist under real name Sophia Vastek, now embarking on a new creative journey with her new moniker and upcoming album, Alight!, the act of taking on a new name is portentous, signifying a departure from what’s past, while also preserving honored ties to legacy and family. The album is announced for a September 4th release date on Hout Records.

Today, Vastek shares the album’s second single “Quarry,” which is baroque and whirring. Warm woodwinds crest over a tightly wound piano motif.

The music on Alight! extends and expands the breakthrough Sova achieved on In Our Softening, a sublime solo recital of original music, performed on a modest 1902 upright piano with softened hammers and a cracked soundboard that had been rescued from a church previously occupied by a de facto hate group. Here, she broadens her conception to accommodate contributions from a clutch of noteworthy fellow travellers: Spencer Zahn (fretless bass guitar), Clarice Jensen (cello), Evan Chapman (drums & electronics), Max Yassky (drums), and Sam Torres (saxophone and more). The album was also mixed by Chuck Johnson.

“My name, and the name I’ve been using professionally since college – Sophia Subbayya Vastek – is so very dear to me,” Sova wrote last year in her personal newsletter, Sounding Softly. “Every piece of it holds me, my history, and my family.” Subbayya, she explained, is her mother’s family name, and Vastek is the name her father took in place of Chwastek when he immigrated to the United States.

Sova’s momentous personal change was several years in the making, an impulse that started began to manifest as she was preparing for another watershed moment: the release of In Our Softening, the magical 2022 album on which she first set aside the classical works she had been interpreting for most of her life, and instead began to share music she was newly creating for herself. Her soul music, as she puts it.

From that moment of discovery arose the need for a fresh identity to convey the change. Why Sova? Because beyond being an abbreviation of her given name, sova (or sowa) is the word in several Slavic languages (including her father’s native tongue) for owl—a mythological symbol of wisdom.

Sova credits Torres, her husband and partner in S&S Presents, a Troy-based concert-producing organization, with helping to facilitate her creative breakthroughs. “He is so great at listening,” she explains. “I’ll come at him with ideas, and he just has this knack for listening in an intuitive way; he’s able to zoom out and think about things in a really beautiful way.” As the producer and mastering engineer for Alight!, Torres helped Sova to realize her exacting ideas about the layers, textures, and colors each piece required.

In pursuing the evolution of her sound and style that resulted in Alight! Sova found a kindred spirit in the contemporary Polish artist Hania Rani, who had similarly transitioned from formative roots in classical piano to a more boundless style encompassing electronics and collaborators. And while she has never considered herself to be a jazz musician, she found inspiration in the vast catalog of Keith Jarrett, whose illimitable style illustrated the courage it takes to follow your muse where it leads, both throughout the years and in the moment, and the benefits of doing so.

Building the band she needed to realize her conceptions came easily, she says. “When I was in the early stages of thinking about the instrumentation and the things that I was hearing, I just immediately knew that these were the people.” Several of the musicians, like Zahn and Jensen, were acquaintances who S&S Presents had hosted in the Capital Region. “I knew that I wanted people like Clarice and Spencer and Evan, who are so adept at world-building.”

Plans were made, ideas hatched, and eventually paths aligned for the recording of the nine tracks that comprise Alight!  On “Hum,” the listener is confronted with a piano sound very different from what preceded it—it’s the noisy, gritty upright from In Our Softening, and the contrast is an effect Sova wanted Alight! to have.

The Softening piano is also integral to “Hymn for Slowing,” a composition that maintains an exquisitely tense balance between music of seemingly effortless beauty and the very real visceral labor and machinery required to produce it. For Sova, the hymnlike melody and distanced layers are reminiscent of Officium, the groundbreaking (and best-selling) 1993 collaboration between saxophonist Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble.

“Quarry” is an instance of music that waited for its time to come: a brief sketch Sova had jotted in a notebook a decade ago, extracted, polished, and given lustrous new life with help from collaborating artists. At the surface level, the title “The Owls Are Not What They Seem” is borrowed from Twin Peaks, the cult-classic television series by David Lynch and Mark Frost that coined the line. But it also harks back meaningfully to sova being a Slavic term for owl—a term that signifies wisdom while also evoking ambiguity.

Alight! closes with one last appearance by the storied upright piano of In Our Softening: “Vast,” whose title simultaneously refers to Sova’s given surname while also signaling the huge new horizons the artist has opened up by finding her own personal musical voice. Along with the instrument’s intrinsic noises, the track preserves other intimate audio artifacts that testify to the hands-on humanity of this music.

Listen closely and you’ll even hear Sova draw breath as she prepares to embark on this final statement: a tender benediction that acknowledges everything that came before, while also signaling her courageous acceptance of change. The music is wise and tender, elusive and direct—Sova’s soul music, realized with a little help from her friends.

#sophiavastek