Carmen Villain's 'Memoria' Turns Airy Ambience into Cold, Dub-Inflected Machinery
The Oslo musician's new album takes its title and inspiration from Apichatpong Weerasethakul's film, featuring disruptive, sonorous bass notes that puncture the music like perforations in an old film reel. It marks a sharp departure from her 2022 breakthrough, replacing pastel tones with a stoic, steely palette of shuddering dub rhythms and metallic textures. Recognizable woodwinds and brass peek through the digital muck, but the overall mood is monochrome and mechanistic.
The album draws its conceptual framework from Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 2021 film, where a mysterious, unexplained sound drives the narrative. Villain translates this cinematic device into recurring, disruptive bass notes that act like physical punctures in the music's fabric, creating a stark contrast to her previous, more welcoming style.
Although the record features contributions from flutist Johanna Orellana and trumpeter Eivind Lønning, these acoustic elements are heavily processed, emerging as fleeting, ghostly fragments. Tracks like "Blue" and "Hey Synapses" showcase a brittle, glitchy aesthetic, drawing comparisons to experimental electronic artists such as Andy Stott and Jan Jelinek, marking a significant sonic evolution for the Oslo-based musician.
This release could influence experimental music listeners and critics by validating the integration of cinematic narrative structures into electronic composition. It may also affect the artist's career trajectory, potentially broadening her audience beyond ambient and fourth-world enthusiasts into the darker dub-techno sphere. For the wider music community, the album's stark aesthetic shift might inspire other artists to explore more mechanistic, cold textures, while its thematic ties to a renowned film could spark cross-disciplinary interest in sound design and storytelling.