Helen Svoboda has shared Veins, a further taste of her forthcoming album Headwater, out June 26th via Room40. The track pairs the Finnish/Australian double bassist, vocalist and composer with Finnish vocalist Selma Savolainen, and it draws her Finnish background directly into the vocal work.
Born in Finland and raised in Australia from the age of five, Svoboda runs that background through the album’s vocal work, which carries echoes of Finnish folk harmony and traces of invented “Finnish” words, with Savolainen as a second voice. On Veins, Savolainen explores the repeated phrase: “The veins I’ve grown from my mother / The tentacles beneath my skin.”
“This short pondering is injected with raw emotion and melancholic beauty, as if she is bursting out of her younger self,” Svoboda says of Savolainen’s performance.
Headwater gathers sixteen threads — or “earworms” — built from two double basses, two voices and electronics, treated as both singular and combined material. Svoboda has described the album as an abstracted picture of self, a tapestry that blurs the edges of identity: strange, beautiful, evaporative and fluid, like memory itself.
The instrumental tracks push the double bass past its usual chamber role. Svoboda works with collaborator Jacques Emery on the interplay of the two basses, set against Tilman Robinson‘s electronics, to find a different range of timbre and weight. The full ensemble is Svoboda (double bass, voice, composition), Emery (double bass), Savolainen (voice) and Robinson (electronics, production).
We shared the album’s opener, If, in April which explored a dream shaped by constant interruptions, it was accompanied by a video that was directed and filmed by Angus Kirby. Headwater is out June 26th on Room40.
Pre-Order: https://helensvoboda.bandcamp.com/album/headwater