Sóley and her insatiable “Endless Summer”
A land of ice, fire and fresh air. In short, the land of every single element. They reside there in cyclical harmony and self-manage without making a sound, in an astounding serenity that nothing can touch. Its invincibility, its nature that seems to remain unmoved faced with the hostility of the world, is of an absolute rarity. Its covetousness accentuates itself, is to be dreamed of and digested. Sóley’s Iceland is nothing special – at least for her. For others, it is filled with wisdom.
Since her first album “We Sink”, in which she proclaims her love for instrumental and traditional engineering, Sóley has spilled a lot of bile. Bile that streamed intensely in “Ask the Deep” and “Krómantik” by forming a mass of lively melancholy, back when she questioned the void with her organs and her murmurs, of that bittersweet hindsight that aroused so many epidermal quivers. The blackness seems to have lifted, swept aside by a season – or a current state – that the artist dreams to be eternal. Summer and its infinite warmth. The release of “Endless Summer” is imminent. “I just love the idea of craving summer. I love summer and i love wanting it and i love waiting for it. So, “Endless Summer” is not really a summer album though it’s definitely a little more positive from my previous works but it’s an album of hope and desire. I wrote it during a period of one year so i went through all the seasons making it, it was really interesting. I remember how i was feeling in every season. I remember how it affected the compositions at that time.”, she tells me. “It’s my favorite musical world. Like composing a bit complex and weird pieces. One of my goals for this album was to write songs on the piano where i would actually need to practice playing and singing and it worked! Some of this stuff is hard for me to play, but i’m practicing!”
Her year of artistic autarky – her very own musical ecosystem – also enabled her to galvanize her style. Made up of collages and sound designs, Sóley’s musicality takes pride in adopting an approach that is at once artisanal and natural, without fuss or additions that would distort her work. Everything is sound engineering: the music box at the start of “Úa”, the glorious wind on “Inbetween”, the brass instruments and harmonium on “Sing Wood to Silence”, even the album cover artwork shows a patchwork of colours, chalk lines and face of her world. (quote)
Fleeting, peaceful and cheerful – childlike, then – Sóley’s work awakens everywhere, is everywhere, in everyday life’s nook and crannies and everything that gravitates around them: “A cliché to say but yes, nature inspires me. The world really does inspire me. The relaxation of being in the nature, it’s just something you can’t compare with.” Like something common, easy, within reach. The intelligence is there, to catch simplicity in flight instead of torturing it, torturing us. Getting used to wisdom is hard. “Endless Summer” like an Icelandic summer, a liminal turning point, an endless change of awareness into which the artist invites us, open-minded.
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