You could totally be next to me is the manifestation of the long-time friendship between Opuntia (aka Camila de Laborde), a Mexico City-based producer-vocalist, and Jenny Berger Myhre, a Norwegian, Oslo-based experimental multidisciplinary artist who works with sound, video, and photography. It was originally commissioned by the Norwegian Borealis festival for experimental music.
Opuntia and Myhre have kept each other close through voice messages for over a decade. The album continues their work from Here is always somewhere else (Breton Cassette, 2022), which was a diary of sonic postcards sent between Jenny and Opuntia from January to November 2020—a time when travelling was out of the question—and was made of recordings from travels in Sweden, Mexico, Japan, Palestine, Lithuania, and from Myhre’s home in Oslo.
You could totally be next is an eight-dreamscape suite that focuses on the intimate and most vulnerable warmth of early morning sleep with its dream-like, under-the-skin images and thoughts. Opuntia recites her free-associative thoughts in a sleepless voice, which wanders through dream residue, and at one point imagines herself with a drum machine in her hand. Myhre gently embraces Opuntia’s waking thoughts with waterlike colours and fragmented, electroacoustic melodies made with a real drum machine, mysterious electronics, synths, tape loops, harmonium, and piano. Myhre allows Opuntia’s thoughts to slip in and out of tune, harmony, and rhythm, adding clever, often ironic counterpoints to the sometimes absurd. and suddenly illuminated thoughts of Opuntia as she recollects her dream fragments. Myhre adds four instrumental pieces that act as reflections on Opuntia’s dream-like thoughts.
This album demands deep listening to be immersed in Opuntia and Myhre’s fragile, dream worlds and to understand their inspiring intimacy. The suggestive cover artwork is by Portuguese artist oro íris (aka Laura dos Campos).
Eyal Hareuveni
Jenny Berger Myhre (Tape loops, piano, harmonium, electronics, synths, voice, drum machine), Camila de Laborde (Opuntia) (vocals), Vilde Sandve Alnæs (violin), Inga Margrete Aas (double bass), Niklas Adam (SuperCollider, modular synthesizer), Jo Berger Myhre (bass, drum machine)
