Carmen Villain

Carmen Villain, the stage name of Carmen Hillestad, is a musician/producer born in Midland, Michigan, and now based in Oslo. Having set aside a career as a top model that landed her on the pages of Elle, Vogue and Marie Claire, she released her debut album in 2013. "Sleeper" revealed her as an indie-rock singer-songwriter influenced by the raw sound of the '90s, particularly Sonic Youth and Royal Trux. Starting from this first building block, the Mexican-Norwegian artist began a gradual process of sonic evolution, moving toward atmospheric, ambient-rooted structures. 2017's "Infinite Avenue", while showing the first signs of this shift, is still a song-based record marked by aching psych-folk textures and dream-pop shades.

It's with "Both Lines Will Be Blue" (2019), her first fully instrumental work, that the transition from songwriter to weaver of ambient landscapes is fully realized, born from the intersection of synthetic modulation, field recordings and jazz influences. The subsequent pieces of the puzzle find Villain exploring the electronic lexicon in search of an ever more hybrid, multifaceted definition, with results effectively crystallized in the suite "Affection in a Time of Crisis" (2020), produced for Longform Editions, and above all in the dynamic "Only Love From Now On" (2022).