Music that feels like it emanates from my youth-when electronic keyboards could elicit the newest and the most nostalgic emotions I experienced. Through the years this type of music in my ears has been lost, but here it's been found. Tranquil and ruminative. A spring in cool, fall air.
Pianist and synth player Lauvdal is a prolific collaborator. Her roots are in jazz, playing in countless ensembles in Oslo’s scene. She is one third of the shape-shifting improvisation trio Moskus, and also played on Jenny Hval’s 2018 EP, The Long Sleep. It’s only recently that she ventured into recording solo. From A Story Now Lost, produced with Laurel Halo, is a suite of woozy electronics and keys. Intricately layered, the tracks unfurl in gauzy webs and ebbs rather than marching out of the speakers.
Farewell To Faraway Friends is less layered, more hand-crafted, recorded at home with nothing more than two mics and a Wurlitzer keyboard. It’s an album that feels simultaneously itinerant and domestic, exploratory and private. Lacking the augmentation of her debut, it retains the knack of tumbling out the speakers like leaves twirling through the wind, with trickles of notes dancing through their own sustains. A sense of intimacy, that you’re listening in on a private ritual, is only amplified as you hear the creaks and soft clunks of the Wurlitzer as Lauvdal’s fingers move across its keyboard.
This feeling of being both homely and placeless, settled and roaming, makes sense when Lauvdal speaks about her life over the last decade or so. Years of touring internationally also meant years of travelling alone. Thanks to the generous parental leave available in Norway, after she had her first child, she opted to bring her family with her.
“When you’re away for longer periods, it’s strange, you change. At least I did,” she admits. “You get into this different way of being in the world, of travelling and seeing a lot of things. When you get home there’s a friction with that – who am I in this place? You need to adjust. When I was travelling with my daughter and partner we were more adventurous. We wanted to stay longer in each place and see more. We didn’t need that readjustment when we got back.”
“I think that for a long time, I didn’t really need it,” Lauvdal says, explaining why it took so long to put out her own music. “I really enjoy collaboration, and I have a very social relationship to music. It’s hanging out with friends and playing together, which is a really nice way to be in the world. But maybe six months before the pandemic, I was extremely tired from touring a lot and from being sort of dragged in a lot of different directions with all the many different projects, and so I sort of needed to gather my thoughts.”
Lauvdal decided to take a bit of time off — then Covid came along, and she had a lot more time off. “I suddenly found myself sitting in a room and playing alone for myself,” she says, “not having an audience and not having anybody at all, not even somebody recording it. I was completely alone, and that was a super-weird and intense feeling for me. Like, who do I do this for? It was a very, very new experience, but also sort of what I needed to get back the joy.”
The album was produced by Laurel Halo, the Ann Arbor-born, Berlin-based artist who, like Lauvdal, has a penchant for aural experimentation. The process, true to Lauvdal’s background, was a collaborative one, initiated by sending sketches over to Halo. “We found some mutual favorites,” Lauvdal recalls, “and we talked a lot about process, and then she asked, ‘Do you ever improvise with your own improvisations?’ That was really a door-opener for me, because up till then, I’d only sampled other people and other instruments.”
From Crack:
There’s something to be said about full-length debuts from artists some years into established professions. There’s often an eagerness from all manner of fans and critics, who await such releases with an additional air of excitement. Prospective listeners may well ponder how the creators of these highly-anticipated, long-awaited projects will make sense of colourful careers and reconcile the various offshoots of their work into a singular album, after extended spells of time spent honing a craft, working closely with peers and experimenting across a diverse spectrum of musical landscapes.
Anja Lauvdal is a Norwegian musician and composer who released her solo debut From a Story Now Lost last year via Smalltown Supersound. Hailing from the small town in the south of Norway where label founder Joakim Haugland started the imprint in the 90s, the record was a full circle moment for more than just Lauvdal. Created with LA-based producer and Awe founder Laurel Halo – who herself shared a remarkable album, Atlas, just a few weeks back – From a Story Now Lost was exquisite and transportive, and chronicled an artist in a clear moment in both time and place. A graduate of the prestigious Trondheim Conservatory of Music, the release marked the latest stop in a musical odyssey that has seen her particulate in various ensembles and collaborate with renowned artists like Jenny Hval both in the studio and on stage over the past decade or so.
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