Norwegian, Copenhagen-based performer-improviser-sax and keyboards player Danielle Dahl is an active figure in the Danish underground and experimental scene who has exhibited an affinity with extreme sonic terrains on her previous projects Tigers Mind or Bravura in the Face of Grief. Her debut solo album focuses on a different attraction, this time on carnal desires and sexual passions that attempt to transcend the self, body and soul.
«Loosening Orions Belt» draws its title from the Biblical Book of Job and summarizes a year-long work of Dahl and producer Andreas Pallisgaard on the themes of sexuality and seduction and breaking away from old and destructive roles. The album is released in a limited-edition of 100 black vinyls plus 12 copies of red and black vinyls and download option.
Dahl and Pallisgaard created a minimalist-electronic, chamber soundscapes-songs, inspired by the seminal work of composers Laurie Spiegel, Wendy Carlos and Raymond Scott. These soundscapes-songs are carefully crafted of sounds of vintage, analogue synthesizers, accompanied by sparse beats and a-capella choir, with sounds from field recordings and samples of Japanese court music.
Dahl delivers these suggestive soundscapes-songs in a high-pitched and distant voice of one who offers testimonies of her most intimate experiences, innermost desires and sexual rituals as BDSM – as seen on the cover designed by her and Michella Bredahl and articulated in the song «Hands». These clever and surprisingly playful soundscapes-songs tempt us into Dahl’s world, to participate with her in challenging conventions and norms; to release and articulate all. «Don’t try to hold it in», as she sings on «After Laughter Comes Tears» or her attempt to feel «all my anxieties melting away», as realized in «Hands».
And she keeps her word. On «Relationship Goals» she wonders «which one is the addict, and which one is the drug». On the angelic «Love Song» her desire becomes almost tangible: «when you touch me, my flesh falls off the bone» and on «Liquid Body» she describes a fantasy of group sex that «opens my whole body, skin and tissue melting away… there’s no end and no beginning of me».
Eyal Hareuveni
Danielle Dahl (v, synth, samples, field rec), Mija Milovic (v); Hanne Marie La Fevre (v), Ania Rybacka (v), Lo Ersare (v), Lil Lacy (v), Kristoffer Raasted (v), Greta Eacott (v), Oliver Laumann (perc)
