Ela Stiles ‘Songs On Harmonium With Voice'/ Review by Lakshmi Krishnan
Ela Stiles delivers an aural tapestry of divine melancholy in her newest release “Songs On Harmonium With Voice”.
Ela Stiles’ latest release hits with “a bit of sadness, a bit of hope” and an entourage of deeply noir-ish fever sounds in her first offering since 2016, ‘Songs On Harmonium With Voice’. Released independently, the Naarm-based singer has an eloquent knack for compacting the crux of her EP into its mere title whilst delivering an undying gothic euphony with just her voice and an organ.
“My friend Emma gifted me a harmonium a few years ago and I started using it to make tape loops and ambient recordings for other albums initially. I found that the sound of the harmonium was so beautiful and …. I wanted to make this record just harmonium and voice with little to no effects or even harmonies or anything, so the result is quite haunting”, says Ela.
Ela Stiles
‘S.B. Mantra’ opens the EP with an ecclesiastical foreboding as Stiles’ hymns “sanctimonious bitch”, like it’s a holy order over deeply stark and tempered organ monotones that arc underneath the entire 7-track release. Between ‘Lover’, ‘Memory Can’t Help’ and ‘Silence’, which were originally pop songs slated to feature in a forthcoming record, Stiles’ broody vocals feel entirely hungry for a glimmer of lightness and weightlessness. Listening back to this release it feels like Stiles is performing a symphonic haunting or singing to a ghost lurking in the dark shadows. Maybe we are the ghosts?
With Jack Farley on mixing duties, the doubles of the vocal accompaniment in the heavily choral tracks ‘Kumbh Mela’ and ‘Hit Hard’ deliver a semi-smoky jaded effect and the hazy moroseness is extremely fitting. Stiles says herself that “the harmonium on this record makes everything sound sad”, as it should! As a capper, ‘Molten Metal’ bounces more lightly than the other tracks, there’s a nip of hope in the peppy overture of the harmonium that really seals the exploratory nature of this EP. ‘Songs On Harmonium With Voice’ is entirely a voyage of re-imagining old tracks and harmonising new materials rooted in pure seductive ambiguity.
~Listen to the bewitching EP below~
Ela Stiles’ latest EP “Songs On Harmonium With Voice” is officially out via independent release on all streaming services. Stay updated with the artist here.
Words by Lakshmi Krishnan.
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