Memoria

Description

Memoria, the latest album by Carmen Villain on Smalltown Supersound, opens with flute chords, like sighs, that slowly fill a vast soundscape, inviting the listener to slow down and enter a state of deep listening. It is an introduction that skillfully guides the listener towards an album of spectral and decelerated dub, which shimmers, growls, and fades away over the course of the seven tracks organized narratively. In this regard, Memoria picks up where Villain left off with Only Love from Now On (2022), although the present album focuses on sound as memory, and on memories as changing and non-static imperfections. Repetition functions as a narrative of memory; the processing degrades and reshapes the sound, while abstraction allows for a kind of release from linearity. Inspired by the writings of Pauline Oliveros on sounds recalled internally and inaudible to others, as well as by the film Memoria by Apichatpong Weerasethakul released in 2021, Villain approaches memory both as a cognitive faculty and as a form of composition, shaping samples from her own archives into a cosmic introspection.