Carmen Villain’s world beyond words

Filled with crushed samples and movement, the tracks are so vast and layered I find it impossible not to conjure physical space when listening before our call. I picture tundra and craggy ocean, sky and, inevitably, Norwegian fjords. 

She tells me she recorded some final touches in Cabo de Gata, a volcanic natural park in southern Spain. Ah, I think. This makes sense. The music must be inspired in some way by that landscape; all salt flat, dark rock, barreling sea. But no – the main body of Memoria, she says, was recorded in “a room in an office building, basically.” Her studio, in Oslo. “I don’t think the sounds I make in one place versus the others would be different because of the space,” she says. Rather, her process is like “filling a space with sounds… almost like a metaphysical experience.”

I change tack. Perhaps it’s an imaginary place? When she’s listening to the tracks, is she envisioning a space, is there some landscape that she is trying to paint? Villain is kind but firm. “I don’t know if I’m consciously thinking of space,” she says. She redirects. The music is gestural, driven by shapes, textures, lines – a freedom from subjectivity. “Landscape is a good way to describe music. But then we have to think, what kind of landscapes can music generate?”

Here is the crux. Memoria is an album that does not intentionally reference, conjure, or mimic any living landscape. Instead, the music should be seen to function as an abstract space in which we can enact our memories; a place to recall sounds only we can hear. A space made of gestures and movements and shivering light. A space to feel.

I ask her how she made “Blue”, a track that feels particularly granular, particularly ‘abstract’. “I’ll often start with a more clear-cut rhythm,” she says. “Something to hold onto while allowing for lots of movement and processing of sound. I’ll be playing with developing textures and rhythms around it, but [still] allowing it to just be what it is. All the rhythms and textural things happened probably in a couple of recordings.” Villain’s music has been described as ‘spectral dub’, and her ties to the genre are evident in “Blue”, where the bass jitters, grows, growls, and muffled textures and rustlings seem to play in the peripheral. She notes that it informs her process and her ability to be reactive. “I didn’t need to do a lot of post – no chopping up and moving.”

But the track is not easily categorisable. “And then obviously the flute. Johanna [Orellana] plays this tiny, shitty little wooden flute she bought probably for a pound somewhere in the market. I wanted a human response to [the track], a bit of wildness. It’s basically the only place on the record where you hear that someone’s actually played on top of something — a direct response.” 

Orellana is a frequent collaborator. “She is a wonderful flute player, and she’s willing to go there and experiment. She can understand and read my weird language. Because we know each other so well, it’s become quite direct.” In the ambient world there is a tendency to over-intellectualise sound, and Villain is refreshingly direct in her production choices. “I just think I love bass. I don’t know anyone that doesn’t. Whenever I have a party or something, and someone puts on dub, everyone’s always moving straight away.” Alongside Orellana’s flutes, it is clear this is human music; abstract and unexpected but at times also joyful. Music governed by emotional impulse.

Perhaps this is down to Villain’s journey as an artist. She signed to Smalltown Supersound and released her debut album, Sleeper, in 2013. The album has a raw nineties sound, with echoes of Sonic Youth and Royal Trux. It is lyrical music, the voice often entwined with the guitar, but nonetheless it feels lurching and incidental. 2019’s Both Lines Will Be Blue was fully instrumental, and since then Villain has left conventional lyricism out of her work. I ask her why she chose to distill the humanity in her music into something beyond words. “I think that, at the time, I was just really tired of myself. It was very natural. I just found it much more interesting to work on the instrumental stuff and see what could come of that. I didn’t really feel the need to use the voice in that sense anymore.”

Despite this, in Memoria the voice is everywhere, though not in the sense of words. Breath is ever-present, as if the tracks themselves are literally formed of air – from the half-present synth thrumming in “Hope Synapses” to the stuttered flute sighs in “Labour of Imagination”, which swell and peter out in a rhythm that feels like dreaming. To listen to Memoria feels as if you are sitting inside the voice, staring straight up the throat. In this world where everything is embodied and non-verbal, we are surrounded by the act of speaking but never the words themselves. It makes me think of Barthes and his writing on the grain of the voice, where a sound’s point of origin becomes bone, flesh, breath. In music, the voice itself is precisely what cannot be said. 

This brings us back to the landscape and memory discussion. Memoria is an abstract space. It is a vessel for our own internal landscapes, but not a landscape in itself. The very structure of the music enables this, with repetition and distortion acting as retreating, non-static imperfections; memories. “It’s one of the oldest themes within people who make music,” she says. “What are we without our memories? Are we blind in sound? Memory is one of those mysteries of life that we all think about.”

I wonder about the experience of hearing this music live, a shared listening which she tells me is “like an exchange, a communal thing in a way. There is an openness out there which is amazing and people are locked in most of the time. Obviously, it’s not always going to happen, and it depends on the place – different spaces give different receptions. A small room versus playing in a massive church, where the sound resonates for ages, changes the way you hear things and see things. It’s like the sound is interacting with a memory of the space.” I realise that there are several memories at play here, a shared remembering. Villain continues: “I don’t know, maybe you can envision things. But for me, it’s just more about how it feels.” 

I close the computer, and feel I have learnt a lot.