Falling in love is a snowflake on your tongue, when cold dissolves into heat. Ephemeral traces that story — icy angelic vocals meet strings that soar and undulate like a body. Sonic waves mirror movement. Ephemeral is Alto Aria’s new album, self-released on their Copenhagen-based label Rhizome. It doesn’t shy away from romance whilst remaining alternative.
Fleeting beauty is still beauty, like the last of springtime blossom holding on in the fall. Ephemeral approaches the inevitable changes in life with pop music and heart. Track two, Fall Blossom, features chattering clicks and what sounds like a creaking door that is part ASMR, part folk love song. It’s easy to get infatuated with this track. On the release, Alto Aria shares, “Ephemeral is about falling in love. To stay open even when you have a porous heart, even though some things are not meant to hold. Made from a poem, all the songs are threads reaching back to the same moment in time. An ephemeral moment that, for me, will last forever.”
Music is inevitably wrapped up with our experience of time, too. We can go back to it, hopefully forever, but there’s also metre, and a specific time period you spend together as the record spins or stream runs. Ephemeral manipulates time as the rising and falling strings that run through the album give way to a club beat on Porous Heart, which raises the tempo and our heartbeats. Eclipse is another dance-y track in the ambient soundscape with an insistent beat. Some moments are more intense than others. Lyrics taken from the poem echo throughout the release map out their romance.
Alto Aria tells METAL, “Lyrically, I’ve been inspired by using a limited amount of words, creating one poem, which all the songs refer back to. Letting the words change their meaning throughout the album.” Meanwhile, “Sonically, I’ve been interested in repetition and renewal, electronic and acoustic, song and sound. Weaving these together, the album explores many different inspirations and genres that I’m inspired by.”
It makes a lot of sense for an album on love to avoid creative isolation. Alto Aria explains, “The album has a very collaborative nature to it, a sort of shared emotional vocabulary. With features from Croatian Amor, Space Afrika, Dimming, Yan Higa and Skarv, the songs unfold. It has been a pleasure to open up my musical practice with the collaborators, sharing thoughts and ideas on the album, as well as getting their perspectives and sounds on the theme. Apart from the features, a cover of Olive’s You’re Not Alone evolves and dissolves on the album.”
Corporeality is a theme that is key to the release. ”The idea of body memory has informed my process of working with this album. I believe so many memories are stored in the body, like an archive, and can bring forward emotions when finding yourself in a specific setting. I’m very interested in how these feelings unfold, how the body is a carrier bag of earlier experiences, and how memories are passed down from generation to generation.” Their grandmother’s painting from 1985 is the album cover. It’s a thread between experiences and bodies.