- Richly textured and generously emotional, Carmen Villain's fifth album is a masterpiece of jazz-informed ambient and downtempo.
- Let's get this out of the way: yes, this review is late. Quite late. But I couldn't let Only Love From Now On go. It's one of my most played records of the year, and four months after its release, its momentum shows no signs of slowing. Which is curious for a record that feels unusually, almost luxuriously slow. Like a lot of the Norwegian-Mexican artist's music, you could call Only Love From Now On ambient, but that would defy its living and breathing sense of movement. It's electroacoustic music with a startling sense of the acoustic, a Fourth World record adapted to our more familiar Earth.
Carmen Villain's fifth album starts with the sound of sighs, wistful but tender. The trumpeter Arve Henriksen is a clever match for her, his tones—uncannily like human breath, but still brassy—smearing the contoured edges of the hand drums that anchor the track. Then again, those percussive elements are more like buoys, establishing the natural rhythm of the record, which bobs like objects floating near the top of the sea, the waves gently lapping and pushing up then pulling down. "Gestures" is a hell of an opener, taking us to a world that feels richly texted and generously emotional.
The most striking part of Only Love From Now is how direct it is in spite of its gradual pacing. "Future Memory" is all undulating synth leads in empty space, like early '70s prog rock instrumentals. There's feeling and depth to its curlicues of sound, which fade into the interlude "Liminal Space," a musique concréte piece akin to marbles rolling around in your head. Something like dub techno emerges on the surprisingly thrilling "Subtle Bodies," which has a way of rearranging the air around it—via hisses and close, intimate rattles—that reminds me of some of the earliest Pole records. And just when you think Villain might go full-on weepy, on the title track featuring flautist Joanna Scheie Orellana, she splices the sound of the woodwind, until its layers hang over the track like mist blanketing the woods.
So much of this music hangs in the balance between the electronic and the acoustic, like "Silueta," which is a cascade of woodwind motifs that interlock and repeat. Are there any electronics here at all? Does the very nature of the reverb and delay on these tracks count as an electronic element? Are these sounds being looped in Ableton or not? "Silueta," though built from almost purely woodwind sounds, still fits alongside more traditionally electronic tracks like "Gestures" or "Subtle Bodies," because it all feels cut from the same cloth: a kind of music that's soothing but intriguing, music which raises more questions than it could want to answer.
In this way, I was struck by Actress's recent whole-album remix of Only Love From Now On. It highlighted the similarities between two otherwise completely singular artists. Both prefer clipped, repeating musical gestures in place of words or longer-form compositions, but use those to create expansive sonic universes that are both confusing and alluring. From the human-like trumpet on "Gestures" to the closing "Portals," with its high-pitched sound effects and unsure, almost retreating rhythm, the LP is an outpouring of gorgeous sound and feeling that leaves its ultimate effect up to the beholder. As the title suggests, Only Love From Now On is a wave of warmth and hope, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Pulled at the corners by melancholy and unease, these pieces could be taken as elegies for a lost world or the pieces of a new one. Either way, it's stunning.
Tracklist01. Gestures feat. Arve Henriksen
02. Future Memory
03. Liminal Space
04. Only Love From Now On feat. Joanna Scheie Orellana
05. Subtle Bodies
06. Silueta
07. Portals