Carmen Villain – Blue
Norwegian-Mexican producer Carmen Villain presents “Blue,” the second single from her new album Memoria out September 4th via Smalltown Supersound, along with “Blue (Jlin ReWxrk).”
Villain’s dub-informed sound world unfurls on album track “Blue” as sampled wood instruments appear like phantoms into the mix field before becoming legible. The remix sees Villain’s spectral sound placed in dialogue with the unmistakable rhythmic language of Jlin.
The remix of “Blue” is a meeting between two of contemporary electronic music’s most singular artists. Both Villain and Jlin are fascinated by rhythm, space, repetition and abstraction. If Memoria considers memory as something unstable — reshaped every time it is retrieved — “Blue (Jlin ReWxrk)” extends that idea beyond the album itself.
Emerging from Chicago footwork but long since establishing a compositional territory entirely her own, Gary, Indiana’s Jlin has become one of the most distinctive figures in experimental electronic music. Her “Perspective” composition was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Music, while 2024 album Akoma featured collaborations with Björk, Philip Glass and Kronos Quartet.
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.
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.
Recent years spent composing for contemporary dance and installation have also transformed Villain’s relationship with space. Collaborations with choreographer Eszter Salamon, alongside a residency at IRCAM exploring ambisonic spatialisation for the first time, inform Memoria’s heightened attention to sound as a physical and immersive environment.
Much of Memoria is built from a combination of new recordings and material from her 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.
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.
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.
Carmen Villain Tour Dates
Fri. Sept. 4 – Eupen, BE @ Meakusma
Sat. Sept. 5 – Tilburg, NL @ Draaimiolen (DJ set)
Sat. Sept. 19 – Oslo, NO @ Ultima Festival of Contemporary Music
Mon. Oct. 5 – Milano, IT @ Inner_Spaces
Wed. Oct. 7 – Berlin, DE @ After (Listening session)
Fri. Oct. 23 – Amsterdam, NL @ Oude Kerk x Minimal Collective: Post-Space
Fri. Nov. 6 – Utrecht, NL @ Le Guess Who
Sun. Nov. 8 – Utrecht, NL @ Le Guess Who (KMRU presents WAI8)
Sat. Nov. 14 – Oulu, FI @ TAR Festival
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