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MONIKA 091LP
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"Haunting, spooks, ghosts and apparitions are an almost constant presence on I Started Wearing Black, the second album by the Cologne-based artist Sonae (pronounced "so-nah"). . . . I would like to rehabilitate hauntology and use it properly to characterize I Started Wearing Black, because the term is rarely as compelling to describe music as is the case here. The most recent other example could be Asiatisch by Fatma Al Qadiri (2014), but with a completely different frame of reference. [This music] rustles, crackles, ruffles, crunches, rattles, scrapes, sometimes a beat emerges from the constant noise, sometimes an obscure voice mumbles incomprehensibly, sometimes a melancholy piano figure is prevented by this noise from coming too much to the foreground. It definitely is eerie . . . In British pop-jargon, eerie first occurred to me more often when referring to particularly leftfield, spooky and... well... ghostly dub, a bass-heavy, echoing noise, from Augustus Pablo to Creation Rebel to Burial. . . . Sonae is not a kind of neo-romantic veiling with a tendency for escapist nebula. It is more a noise of latency. The noise signals a latent -- not necessarily acute -- threat, a latent uneasiness about... yes... about what? About a 'System Immanent Value Defect'? That's the name of a track on I Started Wearing Black where something that sounds like a French Horn (or a foghorn?) battles for attention through or against the background noise. . . . In the title track, after 184 seconds of rattling and hissing, a beat is unleashed, like an arrow released from a spanned bow, a beatific relief, if there is such a thing. 'White Trash Rouge Noir' first meanders along spookily, then after 144 seconds it transforms itself into a distant cousin of Einstürzende Neubauten 's 'Yü-Gung', but there is no Big Male Ego to be fed here . . . Furthermore, I Started Wearing Black was finished long before the black dresses were worn at the Golden Globes as a sign of protest against sexual violence. . . . The political dimension of gaining weight, feeling ugly and therefore dressing in black in I Started Wearing Black lurks within the noise and never becomes explicit and only rarely manifest -- or a manifesto." --Klaus Walter "Dream Sequence" features Gregor Schwellenbach. Black-on-black cover print; Includes download code.
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MONIKA 082LP
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Monika Enterprise presents Far Away Is Right Around the Corner, the debut album by Cologne artist Sonae. Containing ten tracks written between 2012 and 2014, the record deals with reflections about friendship, growing up, and everyday life full of hope. Sonae's music is wide, flowery, and raw, from the very quiet ambient pieces to tiny club electronica moments, always embedded in an electronic soundscape. Sonae put out her first release in August 2012: the two-track EP Cologne on ambient and electronica label A Strangely Isolated Place. Her remix of "Saint" by Markus Guentner appeared in 2013, with two compilation appearances following later that year: "Entmutigt" on Sillage Intemporel's Elles and "Song of Hate and Anger" on Guentner's For Substrata, the latter appearance alongside such artists as Ismael Pinkler, Gustavo Lamas, and Rafael Anton Irisarri. 2013 was also the year of Sonae's live debut at the Perspectives Festival in Berlin, where she performed as part of an immense lineup alongside the likes of Ada, Electric Indigo, Mimicof, Islaja, and many more. In 2014 Sonae appeared at Art's Birthday Party at Södra Teatern in Stockholm, t.a.t. Cologne, and the Ambientmusikzimmer at Weltkunstzimmer Düsseldorf. In August of 2014 she released a remix for ambient artist 36 and in December the Shirley M. EP, a split release on comfortzone with Austrian musician Chra. In addition to her work as a musician, Sonae is an active member of female:pressure, an international network of female artists in electronic music, organizers of the female:pressure electronic concert series in Cologne and regular events in Berlin. Sonae's ambient creations inhabit a subtle space within the musical cosmos; one where the listener can go to experience a kind of sonic weightlessness -- just float off and let the sound waves wash over you.
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