Vanessa Amara - Music For Acoustic Instruments and Feedback

The beguiling yet inviting music of Vanessa Amara has long presented studies and invocations of ambient music and experimental sound practices with a graceful relief. Their latest album Music for Acoustic Instruments and Feedback is a collection of unedited live recordings from 2016-2020. It charts a formal path for creaton, and in doing so manufactures their most dazzlingly beautiful album to date.

Vanessa Amara is a duo from Copenhagen. More recently they've forged links to Coomkeen, Ireland. Together, Birk Gjerlufsen and Sebastián Santillana have released a small number of recordings, with their 2016 album You're Welcome Here bringing them into a cri1cal orbit with contemporary experimental music and earning them much-deserved recognition. A cluster of releases followed that took their intricately rendered worlds into new constellations and alignments with the suite of instruments that they recurrently call upon. Last year's Leopards and Poses introduced a daring alacrity to the dreamy forms one may associate with Vanessa Amara, suggesting a wealth of silhouettes and wicked suns. Music for Acoustic Instruments and Feedback hints at a similar mischief through its inventive formal strategy, accompanying ideas, and charged theatre, yet it pursues the melancholic kernel at the heart of the project more intently than any previous release. The album's title is descriptive of the album's process. Utilising an arrangement of microphones, speakers, and tape machines, Vanessa Amara created a system that allowed them to work with acoustic feedback. In the group's own words, "We don't have a studio or a piano, so instead we work briefly in other peoples' homes or in any room made available to us. Each of these rooms, what is within them and how the instruments resonate there, is what generates the sound."