Antonina Nowacka – Sylphine Soporifera

Antonina Nowacka’s third solo album opens as though suspended between elements, with gossamer-thin oscillations and glimmering harp glissandos offset by a reedy ocarina which seems to defy wind speeds and barometric pressure, staying the course and keeping everything on an even keel. The song, which is titled ‘Moth Spins’, quivers between helium ascents and a precipitous crumpling, while droning synthesizers shift in and out of focus, echoing the acoustic instrumentation which includes Catia Lanfranchi on the organ, accented from the halfway point by a few plucks of zither.

The vocalist and sound artist makes music which sounds like a pebble tossed into vast oceans of water, which charts its own spritely course more nymph than selkie after the first few agile hops and skips. Yet after drawing inspiration from Javanese caves and Polish fortresses, the swirling melodic structures of Hindustani classical music and early Cumbia rhythms from Mexico and Peru, the nine tracks of Sylphine Soporifera are pulled out of the aether, named after an imaginary species and the lands they inhabit, roused by the writings of the Austrian esotericist Rudolf Steiner who conjured spirits of the air, the Latin word ‘sopor’ which indicates a deep sleep and might implicate some form of intoxication or drowsiness, the ‘unreal desert landscape’ of the Paracas Peninsula with its pottery and candelabra and the treeless peat moors of the Outer Hebrides.

Warbling and glossolalic, her voice emerges on ‘Odrracir’ over the low drones of the ocarina, and is described in the album notes as both haunting and alien, transpiring as though from beyond the veil. Speaking of a strange symbiosis, Nowacka says that:

‘The voice is the most beautiful and resonating instrument. When I sing I feel I create a field in between myself and the air in front of me. It is not just that I’m singing – something in the space in front of me is happening, and I merge with this sphere.’

Elsewhere on Sylphine Soporifera the frolic is less aerated and more spectral, with sounds winding down long corridors or filtering through the walls of the next room, like with the winnowing flute of ‘Nite Vision’, which is one of three features by Oskar Karski who repeats the gesture on ‘Field Vision’ and on ‘Transit’ leans heavily into the bass guitar. Lavishing its tale of discovery, ‘I Found You in the Cloud’ is shimmering and summery with steady vocals and a bucolic mise-en-scène, while the percussive rebound of the zither on ‘Transit’ as it capers over Karski’s sustained bass conjures a sort of spartan thoroughfare and wide-eyed optimism which is redolent of the Low instrumental ‘A New Career in a New Town’.

While her vocals cut between crystalline sharpness and a tremulous, folksy charm, Nowacka’s embrace on Sylphine Soporifera of a diverse instrumentational palette – with the ocarinas from the terracotta town of Budrio in Italy, whistles from Mexico, synthetic Hawaiian sounds squeezed out of a vintage organ and simple bamboo flutes from Nepal – gives the record an air of fourth world experimentalism beyond the trappings of freak folk or anodyne new age.

Limpid harp illuminates ‘Light Light’ and on ‘Turning into Dolphins’, sine tones place their submerged whistles and pulses in conversation with Nowacka’s vocals, ocarinas and twinkling chimes. The burbling electronics of ‘Field Vision’ sound like the whipping and flickering ends of a deep sea cable, half-buried beneath a sandy layer of flute, and on the briefer still ‘Transit II’ chirping birds over a gamelan-like accompaniment spiral and then faintly begin to swarm. Finally the album closer ‘Time Vapour’ seems to look out upon a deluge of rain from some private vessel or chapel, with a choral aspect to the vocals as low chimes like a pattern of orbs coagulate and flick upwards in a final gesture of transport.