AN NCS PREMIERE: SYLVAINE — “DELUSIONS”

 

On May 13, Season of Mist will release Wistful, the second album of Norwegian composer and multi-instrumentalist Sylvaine. On this new album, Sylvaine again composed all the music and handles vocals and almost all instruments, with Alcest’s Neige and Stephen Shepard splitting the drum performances and with additional guests Coralie Louarnika and Thibault Guichard performing violin, viola, and cello on the title track.

What we have for you today is the debut of the album’s opening song “Delusions” (one of the tracks on which Neige plays drums). If you’re unfamiliar with Sylvaine, you’ll learn from the first seconds of “Delusions” that her music is in many ways an outlier for our putrid site. Most obviously, she has a beautiful, ethereal singing voice, but the exceptions to our “rules” don’t stop there.

 

 

There’s no ripping, tearing, or blood-letting in “Delusions”, no skull splintering or other sonic manifestations of violence and derangement. The song is instead entrancing and enthralling — but in its own way just as capable of transporting listeners away from the mundane aspects of daily existence as more frenzied and storming torrents of sound.

At nearly 11 minutes long, “Delusions” has the time to cast a deep and lasting spell. It begins doing so with the reverberating and haunting quality of Sylvaine‘s voice, shimmering ambient tones, and the strumming of a guitar. The song soon becomes heavier as the drums enter the picture along with the haze of distorted chords and the deep thrum of the bass.

But the haunting, mystical quality of the music persists, with an atmosphere of longing and loss that settles like a mantle of mist about you, but with glints of brightness that appear, as if the suspended vapor has caught the light of the moon. The music will get your head moving as Sylvaine introduces driving rhythms here and there, but “Delusions” is mainly the stuff that dreams are made of. And this is a beautiful and poignant dream indeed.

 

photo by Andy Julia

Wistful will be released by Season of Mist on May 13 and it’s available for pre-order HERE. This is the track list:

1. Delusions
2. Earthbound
3. A Ghost Trapped In Limbo
4. Saudade
5. In The Wake Of Moments Passed By
6. Like A Moth To A Flame
7. Wistful

Previously, two other songs from the album premiered, and you can check those out HERE and HERE.

https://sylvainemusic.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/sylvainemusic