Vivid Peace Restored
Working with found sounds, instruments and her own voice, Stina Stjern makes a striking noise on 'Vivid Peace Restored', damaging her sounds with tape hiss and saturation to create a surreal audio diary that's right at home on Susanna Wallumrød's SusannaSonata imprint.
For over two decades, Stjern has been a Norwegian mainstay, fronting rock band Supervixen when she was still a teenager, and blurring shoegaze and psychedelia on her last two solo albums. But in recent years, her material has veered leftwards: on 2018's 'Stina Stjern's Numbness', she rearranged a slew of tracks from legendary Norwegian outfit Motorpsycho, and in 2022, she contributed to Susanna's Baudelaire-influenced collaborative album 'Elevation', working exclusively with cassette tapes and signaling the kind of windswept, ferric experimentation that characterizes 'Vivid Peace Restored'. Everything on the album has passed over the heads of one of Stjern's cassette decks or Walkmans, and she's keen to stress that there's no hierarchy to the sounds - her voice is given the same pride of place as clanging kitchenware or resonating feedback.
This approach gives the album an ascetic charm that's hard to dismiss. Like Deathprod's vital early material, the beauty is in the raw texture of the sound itself; it almost doesn't matter what Stjern is recording, exactly, her skills have been so well developed that even a distant conversation comes off like a cryptic message from a parallel universe. It's rarely completely obvious what exactly it is we're hearing, anyway - on 'Shrug (Knowing)', Stjern loops and splices fuzzy white noise with indistinct found sounds and tinny percussive knocks, only letting her LFO-mangled oscillators step into full visibility. And 'Go To Your Room' interrupts humming 'Eraserhead'-style industrial drones with stacked samples of various dictaphone-damaged voices. The album is a collage of ideas, half-songs, soundscapes and memories that Stjern blurs into intentionally polychromatic coherence.
Not just a hodgepodge of colors, it's a bold, unique statement, that's able to roll up affecting, emotional songs ('Roll Your Eyes', 'A Thousand Ways of Falling'), with chilling noise experiments ('Metallic Machine') and wonky, field recorded electro-pop ('Spontaneous Deep Dive'), and it never once sounds jarring. It's quite the achievement - if you're into Mica Levi, Islaja or Lolina, this is the obvious next step.
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Working with found sounds, instruments and her own voice, Stina Stjern makes a striking noise on 'Vivid Peace Restored', damaging her sounds with tape hiss and saturation to create a surreal audio diary that's right at home on Susanna Wallumrød's SusannaSonata imprint.
For over two decades, Stjern has been a Norwegian mainstay, fronting rock band Supervixen when she was still a teenager, and blurring shoegaze and psychedelia on her last two solo albums. But in recent years, her material has veered leftwards: on 2018's 'Stina Stjern's Numbness', she rearranged a slew of tracks from legendary Norwegian outfit Motorpsycho, and in 2022, she contributed to Susanna's Baudelaire-influenced collaborative album 'Elevation', working exclusively with cassette tapes and signaling the kind of windswept, ferric experimentation that characterizes 'Vivid Peace Restored'. Everything on the album has passed over the heads of one of Stjern's cassette decks or Walkmans, and she's keen to stress that there's no hierarchy to the sounds - her voice is given the same pride of place as clanging kitchenware or resonating feedback.
This approach gives the album an ascetic charm that's hard to dismiss. Like Deathprod's vital early material, the beauty is in the raw texture of the sound itself; it almost doesn't matter what Stjern is recording, exactly, her skills have been so well developed that even a distant conversation comes off like a cryptic message from a parallel universe. It's rarely completely obvious what exactly it is we're hearing, anyway - on 'Shrug (Knowing)', Stjern loops and splices fuzzy white noise with indistinct found sounds and tinny percussive knocks, only letting her LFO-mangled oscillators step into full visibility. And 'Go To Your Room' interrupts humming 'Eraserhead'-style industrial drones with stacked samples of various dictaphone-damaged voices. The album is a collage of ideas, half-songs, soundscapes and memories that Stjern blurs into intentionally polychromatic coherence.
Not just a hodgepodge of colors, it's a bold, unique statement, that's able to roll up affecting, emotional songs ('Roll Your Eyes', 'A Thousand Ways of Falling'), with chilling noise experiments ('Metallic Machine') and wonky, field recorded electro-pop ('Spontaneous Deep Dive'), and it never once sounds jarring. It's quite the achievement - if you're into Mica Levi, Islaja or Lolina, this is the obvious next step.
Working with found sounds, instruments and her own voice, Stina Stjern makes a striking noise on 'Vivid Peace Restored', damaging her sounds with tape hiss and saturation to create a surreal audio diary that's right at home on Susanna Wallumrød's SusannaSonata imprint.
For over two decades, Stjern has been a Norwegian mainstay, fronting rock band Supervixen when she was still a teenager, and blurring shoegaze and psychedelia on her last two solo albums. But in recent years, her material has veered leftwards: on 2018's 'Stina Stjern's Numbness', she rearranged a slew of tracks from legendary Norwegian outfit Motorpsycho, and in 2022, she contributed to Susanna's Baudelaire-influenced collaborative album 'Elevation', working exclusively with cassette tapes and signaling the kind of windswept, ferric experimentation that characterizes 'Vivid Peace Restored'. Everything on the album has passed over the heads of one of Stjern's cassette decks or Walkmans, and she's keen to stress that there's no hierarchy to the sounds - her voice is given the same pride of place as clanging kitchenware or resonating feedback.
This approach gives the album an ascetic charm that's hard to dismiss. Like Deathprod's vital early material, the beauty is in the raw texture of the sound itself; it almost doesn't matter what Stjern is recording, exactly, her skills have been so well developed that even a distant conversation comes off like a cryptic message from a parallel universe. It's rarely completely obvious what exactly it is we're hearing, anyway - on 'Shrug (Knowing)', Stjern loops and splices fuzzy white noise with indistinct found sounds and tinny percussive knocks, only letting her LFO-mangled oscillators step into full visibility. And 'Go To Your Room' interrupts humming 'Eraserhead'-style industrial drones with stacked samples of various dictaphone-damaged voices. The album is a collage of ideas, half-songs, soundscapes and memories that Stjern blurs into intentionally polychromatic coherence.
Not just a hodgepodge of colors, it's a bold, unique statement, that's able to roll up affecting, emotional songs ('Roll Your Eyes', 'A Thousand Ways of Falling'), with chilling noise experiments ('Metallic Machine') and wonky, field recorded electro-pop ('Spontaneous Deep Dive'), and it never once sounds jarring. It's quite the achievement - if you're into Mica Levi, Islaja or Lolina, this is the obvious next step.
Working with found sounds, instruments and her own voice, Stina Stjern makes a striking noise on 'Vivid Peace Restored', damaging her sounds with tape hiss and saturation to create a surreal audio diary that's right at home on Susanna Wallumrød's SusannaSonata imprint.
For over two decades, Stjern has been a Norwegian mainstay, fronting rock band Supervixen when she was still a teenager, and blurring shoegaze and psychedelia on her last two solo albums. But in recent years, her material has veered leftwards: on 2018's 'Stina Stjern's Numbness', she rearranged a slew of tracks from legendary Norwegian outfit Motorpsycho, and in 2022, she contributed to Susanna's Baudelaire-influenced collaborative album 'Elevation', working exclusively with cassette tapes and signaling the kind of windswept, ferric experimentation that characterizes 'Vivid Peace Restored'. Everything on the album has passed over the heads of one of Stjern's cassette decks or Walkmans, and she's keen to stress that there's no hierarchy to the sounds - her voice is given the same pride of place as clanging kitchenware or resonating feedback.
This approach gives the album an ascetic charm that's hard to dismiss. Like Deathprod's vital early material, the beauty is in the raw texture of the sound itself; it almost doesn't matter what Stjern is recording, exactly, her skills have been so well developed that even a distant conversation comes off like a cryptic message from a parallel universe. It's rarely completely obvious what exactly it is we're hearing, anyway - on 'Shrug (Knowing)', Stjern loops and splices fuzzy white noise with indistinct found sounds and tinny percussive knocks, only letting her LFO-mangled oscillators step into full visibility. And 'Go To Your Room' interrupts humming 'Eraserhead'-style industrial drones with stacked samples of various dictaphone-damaged voices. The album is a collage of ideas, half-songs, soundscapes and memories that Stjern blurs into intentionally polychromatic coherence.
Not just a hodgepodge of colors, it's a bold, unique statement, that's able to roll up affecting, emotional songs ('Roll Your Eyes', 'A Thousand Ways of Falling'), with chilling noise experiments ('Metallic Machine') and wonky, field recorded electro-pop ('Spontaneous Deep Dive'), and it never once sounds jarring. It's quite the achievement - if you're into Mica Levi, Islaja or Lolina, this is the obvious next step.
Estimated Release Date: 29 November 2024
Please note that shipping dates for pre-orders are estimated and are subject to change
Working with found sounds, instruments and her own voice, Stina Stjern makes a striking noise on 'Vivid Peace Restored', damaging her sounds with tape hiss and saturation to create a surreal audio diary that's right at home on Susanna Wallumrød's SusannaSonata imprint.
For over two decades, Stjern has been a Norwegian mainstay, fronting rock band Supervixen when she was still a teenager, and blurring shoegaze and psychedelia on her last two solo albums. But in recent years, her material has veered leftwards: on 2018's 'Stina Stjern's Numbness', she rearranged a slew of tracks from legendary Norwegian outfit Motorpsycho, and in 2022, she contributed to Susanna's Baudelaire-influenced collaborative album 'Elevation', working exclusively with cassette tapes and signaling the kind of windswept, ferric experimentation that characterizes 'Vivid Peace Restored'. Everything on the album has passed over the heads of one of Stjern's cassette decks or Walkmans, and she's keen to stress that there's no hierarchy to the sounds - her voice is given the same pride of place as clanging kitchenware or resonating feedback.
This approach gives the album an ascetic charm that's hard to dismiss. Like Deathprod's vital early material, the beauty is in the raw texture of the sound itself; it almost doesn't matter what Stjern is recording, exactly, her skills have been so well developed that even a distant conversation comes off like a cryptic message from a parallel universe. It's rarely completely obvious what exactly it is we're hearing, anyway - on 'Shrug (Knowing)', Stjern loops and splices fuzzy white noise with indistinct found sounds and tinny percussive knocks, only letting her LFO-mangled oscillators step into full visibility. And 'Go To Your Room' interrupts humming 'Eraserhead'-style industrial drones with stacked samples of various dictaphone-damaged voices. The album is a collage of ideas, half-songs, soundscapes and memories that Stjern blurs into intentionally polychromatic coherence.
Not just a hodgepodge of colors, it's a bold, unique statement, that's able to roll up affecting, emotional songs ('Roll Your Eyes', 'A Thousand Ways of Falling'), with chilling noise experiments ('Metallic Machine') and wonky, field recorded electro-pop ('Spontaneous Deep Dive'), and it never once sounds jarring. It's quite the achievement - if you're into Mica Levi, Islaja or Lolina, this is the obvious next step.