Ella Ion – Map & Creature Skin
Kaurna Land/Adelaide based Ella Ion shares her first new music in over two years with two track “Map // Creature Skin” out now via Our Golden Friend.
Ella will also showcase at The Great Escape in Brighton this month and support Folk Bitch Trio at their shows in London and Paris.
With her first release since 2023 album Waiting, Ion is determined to disrupt the circuit of tension that was bubbling throughout her debut LP. All grown up, she’s no longer content with waiting. In a reclamation of agency, she’s chasing after what she wants, and she’s doing it on her own terms. With this new perspective comes a new layer of rugged vulnerability to her sound.
A serendipitous meeting between Ella and Stefan Blair, one half of Good Morning, led to Ella extending her time in Melbourne early last month, initially only in the city on account of a one-off pop-up show at The Tote. Over two days at York Street Recorders they melded Ella’s folk leanings with Stefan’s intricate production skills honed through a decade in one of Australia’s most beloved self-produced indie duos. The songs were mixed by Dylan Young (Way Dynamic) and Liam “Snowy” Halliwell and features the cello of Lucinda Machin.
On ‘Creature Skin’, one half of her latest two-track release, Ion confronts past iterations of herself. Like shedding layers of skin that she no longer needs, the track explores Ion’s newfound strength in fragility – a product of necessity born out of leaving a version of who she once was behind. She steps into the light of blatant honesty, raw but ready. The counterpart track, ‘Maps’, offers a further insight behind the veil of the musician’s reflective contemplations as she moves forward. Centred around the strangeness of trusting someone new, Ion’s ability to trace the contours of old wounds with poetic lyricism is an exercise in cutting the listener straight to the bone. Exploring ideas of bodily autonomy and the hands of another, the musician treks through a terrain of emotional uncertainty as she figures out how to tread safely in complete and utter exposure.
#ella.ion