Liminality is the debut album of Minru, the project of Caroline Blomqvist, a Swedish musician based in Berlin. While Liminality is a very personal album, documenting her suffering from the passing of someone close to her, the music can be strangely uplifting with a dreamlike quality that comes from being consumed in the moment.
While the feelings of grief, confusion, and pain influence her music, her observations and documenting of this period in music and film (see below) have become part of that healing process. The album’s title, Liminality, takes its name from that process of transition.
“I read that Carl Jung used the word “Liminality” to describe the psychological process of transitioning. I instantly felt seen; it reflected my own experience and the feelings I carried whilst making the album – a sense of the old certainties being gone, but the new not being quite there yet,” she says.
Defined as “the threshold separating one space from another “, Liminality” moves between feeling the ground beneath your feet fall away, fighting through the darkness and the doubt, and the emerging shades of hope and light as you painstakingly make peace with mortality and find yourself as a person again. “I am happy to have encapsulated this moment of time in sound,” Blomqvist says, “it will always be there as a memory.”
There is a profound beauty in her creations. While self-imposed time constraints meant there was no time to linger, this also allowed her stream of consciousness to flow unhindered, helped by her preferred position of solitude and the small, 2-room apartment with squeaky old wooden floors she occupied during the album’s creation.
All of that beauty is present in ‘Light End’, and Caroline’s decision to capture special moments on an old Super 8 camera makes those moving images part of the very fabric of the album.
Liminality is a gift to those who want to stop and listen. As she says: “I hope listeners will feel inspired to slow down a bit, create, draw, cook something. Just be in the moment that is now.”
Caroline on the video:
At the beginning of the pandemic, I bought an old super 8 camera for like 15 Euro, not even sure it was working. I had been interested in this format for a while and wanted to find a way to document my life in the most natural way possible. The music video basically captures different moments from the time I was making my album: Winter days and songwriting sessions in my family’s mountain cabin in Sweden, lockdown spring at the seaside and summer in Berlin with friends. For me, it preserves this strange and special time of our lives, intimate moments and places left behind.
‘Liminality’ is out on 1st July on Morr Music.
Light End is available on streaming services and can also be heard on our Mellow Folk Playlist here.
More here: https://www.minrumusic.com/