I listened to Soela‘s Genuine Silk album more than a dozen times in the first month it was released. It was April 2020, shit had gotten real and was getting more real by the minute. On Genuine Silk, Soela had taken her already fastidious and sometimes immaculate production style and pushed the envelope. The result was a frequently somber but often sonorous soundtrack for a world gone (quietly) mad. Though likely finished before lockdown and otherwise uninfluenced by COVID-19, Genuine Silk was the first and I think the only album released prior to Lisa Bella Donna’s Mourning Light that authentically reflected this bizarre experience for me.
More than a year later and this new EP on Fort Romeau’s Cin Cin label represents a revision and further perfection of Soela’s Genuine Silk sound. The synths that lead off “Berlin” evoke the funereal call of “Sequent C” from Tangerine Dream, who once haunted an older Berlin, and then sounds nothing like it at all. Their Berlin was West Berlin, a city that symbolized a whole era in its disfigurement, drowning in symbolism. Soela’s “Berlin” is drowning in emotion, deeply-felt sensations fashioned to melodies that dive and soar. I don’t know what to call this music — it’s deeply, astonishingly sophisticated, so ethereal it feels it might fall apart, made by someone operating at purposes that seem to be quickly eclipsing the world of DJs, clubs and charts.
Soela: Berlin/Do I Really Need You (Cin Cin / September 2021 / Digital)
1. Soela: Berlin (06:52)
2. Soela: Do I Really Need You (06:26)
⚪️ Disclosure Statement: This record was not submitted as a promo.
This was originally published in #FutureShock: 5 Mag Issue #193 with Oona Dahl, Art of Tones, More Ghost Than Man and more. Support 5 Mag by becoming a member for as little as $1 per issue.
