HEIDI ELVA - Lo-Fi Musings

Materializing out of nowhere in 2008 with her debut album "Ships And Trees", New Zealand harpist Heidi Elva immediately revealed a distinctive sensibility for blending melodic simulacra with experimental minimalism, in an extremely spare formula that found expression as inevitable as it was fitting within a lo-fi electro-acoustic dimension.

Since then, the Melbourne-based artist has sharpened both sides of her music, first taking on the role of refined interpreter on some tracks from Part Timer's splendid "Real To Reel", then revealing a shift toward more pronounced sonic exploration on the exclusive track offered to the free download compilation OndaDrops Vol.3; after this three-year stretch of intense development, Heidi Elva now returns with a new work (currently available only in digital format) that completes her aesthetic and stylistic metamorphosis, following a process of increased articulation of elements while, at the same time, further compositional subtraction, moving toward a naturalistic expressive degree zero.

The artist's intentions are made explicit right from the title of the new record, which essentially mirrors its creative process and even the way it was made and recorded, concentrated into a single day in the Australian winter of 2009 at a Victorian-era residence near Sydney.

Traces of that location remain imprinted on "Lo-Fi Musings" through background noises – from traffic to birdsong, from indistinct voices to distant airplane roars – that drifted in through a balcony left deliberately open and were captured by the microphone alongside Heidi's voice and the sound of her harp, framed by loop and delay pedals and by samples pulled from a mobile phone. Alongside her, just two other musicians, Brett Casey on bass loops and effects and Joe Cummins on trumpet, the latter already present on "Ships And Trees" but now given a more incisive role in the album's overall economy, his instrument lending it deeply nocturnal, disorienting overtones.

One can almost picture the three musicians in a room, as the timid winter light gives way to evening shadows, caught up in the fleeting magic captured across the six tracks and the very long (and largely superfluous) closing stretch of pure field recordings included on "Lo-Fi Musings". What the record gives back of those hours is testimony to a space-time elsewhere, sketched by the harp's slender harmonic lines, framed by effects, beats and floating sonic debris circling oblique abstractions, where hypnotic narcolepsies intersect with the cadences of a catatonic trip-hop and spectral ambient echoes.

Elva's own beguiling voice emerges transfigured, broken into irregular shards, sighs and hallucinated suggestions of the sense of emptiness that, in partially different forms, resonates throughout all the tracks. Thus, the disorientation expressed in the concise iterations of "Simple Pleasures" finds its counterpart in an almost hieratic declamation, while more defined melodies flow over the trip-hop deconstructions of "I'm Falling" and the jazzy saturations of the ethereal "A Thousand Kisses", which push Cummins' ever-present trumpet to the fore, in the track closest to Part Timer on the record.

Rounding out the picture, at opposite extremes, are the bucolic sensations of "Gardenia", the album's only true "song" (just harp and field recordings, as spare as the hushed confessions of Mi And L'au), and the spectral saturations of "Casey's Bassline" and "Church Bells" which, poised between basslines, droning noise and assorted lapping sounds, veer decisively toward the hypnotic ambient oscillations of the silent city of Mark Nelson.

And this is probably precisely the artistic direction Heidi Elva has taken, increasingly drawn toward weaving together pulsing electronic manipulations and spontaneous organic sounds, of which this work offers a thoroughly distinctive sample that resists unified definition, save for its nocturnal atmospheres and slow-moving pace. "Lo-Fi Musings" is the sound of a fleeting moment and its anguished unrepeatability, crystallized into a stasis that is at once fascinating and sinister.

PS: available as a free exclusive download for OndaRock readers, two remixes produced by John McCaffrey (Part Timer): "Simple Pleasures" and "The Heart Is A Lovely Hunter" (a track originally featured on OndaDrops Vol.3).

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29/09/2011

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Raffaello Russo, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition