Carmen Villain – Memoria

Artist and producer Carmen Villain announces her new album, Memoria, out September 4th via Smalltown Supersound and presents the lead single, “Entre Nosotros.”

Memoria picks up where Villain left off with her breakthrough album Only Love from Now On, named one of the best releases of 2022 by Resident Advisor, Pitchfork, Bandcamp, The Quietus, and Boomkat.

Memoria begins like an opened valve; exhaling flute chords slowly fill a vast sonic landscape. It’s an introduction that guides expertly into an album of spectral dub which shimmers, growls, and decays across the narratively ordered seven tracks. Memoria’s focus is sound as memory. Inspired by Pauline Oliveros’s writings on internally recalled sounds inaudible to others, as well as Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2021 film Memoria, Villain approaches memory as both a cognitive faculty and a form of composition, moulding samples from her own archive into a cosmic introspection. The album’s inward gaze takes its inspiration from deep listening as a form of empathy, connecting us simultaneously with ourselves and our environment.

Memoria is built from a combination of new recordings and material from Villain’s sound archive. Recording sessions with frequent collaborator Johanna Orellana (flutes) as well as Eivind Lønning (trumpet), alongside Villain’s own clarinet recordings, are fractured and reassembled into a dense but airy sample bank. Visceral human presence (breath, wind, the physicality of air moving through instruments) and harmonic strands of free jazz appear through layers of processing, as if heard from a distance – or through time. Rhythms and textures degrade. Sound erodes. Memories are recast. And melodies, unlike in Villain’s previous releases, are less distinct and make way for other musical leads.

There is a lineage that can be traced to Rhythm & Sound, clicks-and-cuts, Pharoah Sanders, Jon Hassell, Actress, and Ricardo Villalobos – though often as abstract qualities: small sounds become big while big ones recede into fine-grained rhythm. Minimalism is key to hearing the details: crackling electronics, inhalation, and sighs reverberate within vast spaces and on a foundation of rhythm. This restraint highlights Villain’s tendency to surgically separate sounds and their ghostly sound-memory doppelgängers according to frequencies.

For Villain, memory in sound appears to sit comfortably behind the mixing console of a dub lab, expertly and unpredictably controlling volumes, textures, filters and all other parameters, known and unknown, in an ever-mutating recall.

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