CARMEN VILLAIN - Memoria

Carmen Villain's artistic evolution is a journey of constant change, one that each time leads to a radical rewriting of the self. Her arrival at the ambient maturity of “Only Love From Now On” (2022), suspended between jazz, dub and new age, came in fact after her indie-rock beginnings (“Sleeper”, 2013) and a slow-core interlude in the vein of Charlotte Gainsbourg (“Infinite Avenue”, 2017).
Yet her stylistic signature isn't a form still in the making, but an existential proprioception, a static, centripetal balance capable of taking in the multitude of past experiences and processing their full scope.
The research she pursues, as Pauline Oliveros taught her, is a tacet that lets everything resonate while she, standing still at the pure epicenter of listening, gathers material and builds it a passage toward the most sensitive regions of the spirit. The heterogeneous sonic matter she has perfected here is therefore not a metaphorical construct, nor a linguistic abstraction, but exists sedimented in space, as a stirring-up of remote acoustic elements laid down by memory. Disordered pieces and fragments of lived experience, arranged in a circle to arrive at an evocation of time past.

In these tracks, the mysticism of fourth world music (“Labour Of Immagination”) coexists with the metropolitan tribalism of dub (“Entre Nosotros”), the cosmic vistas of ambient (“Omriss”) and the near-grime nervousness of the minimal, electronic inserts (“Memoria”). On “Blue”, the pulsing heart of the whole album, all these strands cohabit and point to an immersive path capable, in its weave, of cross-contaminating club atmospheres with the ethnic vibrato of Johanna Orellana's Andean flute.

The ecosystems here are boundless, beaten by instrumental free-jazz ghosts and measuredly disrupted by magnetic loops. The cut-up of original elements and old archival tapes, synths and analog instruments, field recordings and samples, builds small, hypnotic, kaleidoscopic pièces and yields an elusive trance music, able to manifest the inescapable force of memory. The resulting record is refined, meticulous, at times bulimic, the reflection of an artist who seems to feel at ease only when multiplying her ideas and inspirations to the nth degree.

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29/09/2026