»Abstraction is also flight. It is freedom from the immediate spatiotemporal constraints of the moment; freedom to plan the future, recall the past, comprehend the present from a reflective perspective that incorporates all three; freedom from the immediate boundaries of concrete subjectivity, freedom to imagine the possible and transport oneself into it; freedom to survey the real as a resource for embodying the possible...« – Adrian Piper (1987)

»Memoria«, Carmen Villain’s latest album on Smalltown Supersound, begins like an opened valve; exhaling flute chords slowly fill a vast sonic landscape as an invitation for the listener to slow down and enter a state of deep listening. It’s an introduction that guides expertly into an album of decelerated, spectral dub, which shimmers, growls and decays across the narratively ordered seven tracks. In this regard, Memoria picks up where Villain left off with 2022’s »Only Love from Now On«, though the current album’s focus is sound as memory – and memories as morphing, non-static imperfections. Repetition functions as memory retold; processing degrades and reshapes sound, and abstraction allows a kind of freedom from linearity.

Inspired by Pauline Oliveros’s writings on internally recalled sounds inaudible to others, as well as Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2021 film Memoria, Villain approaches memory as both a cognitive faculty and a form of composition, moulding samples from her own archive into a cosmic introspection – albeit one that is the opposite of solipsistic. The album’s inward gaze takes its inspiration from deep listening as form of empathy, connecting us simultaneously with ourselves and our environment. Recent years working on composition for contemporary dance and installation – including collaborations with choreographer Eszter Salamon and a residency at IRCAM exploring ambisonic spatialisation for the first time – also inform Memoria’s heightened attention to sound as physical space and immersive environment.

Much of Memoria is built from a combination of new recordings and older archive material: Recording sessions with frequent collaborator Johanna Orellana (flutes) as well as Eivind Lønning (trumpet), alongside Villain’s own clarinet recordings, are fractured and reassembled into a dense but airy sample bank. Visceral human presence (breath, wind, the physicality of air moving through instruments) and harmonic strands of free jazz are appear through layers of processing, as if heard from a distance – or through time. Rhythms and textures degrade. Sound erodes. Memories are recast. And melodies, unlike in Villain’s previous releases, are less distinct and make way for other musical leads.

There is a lineage that can be traced to Rhythm & Sound, clicks-and-cuts, Pharoah Sanders, Jon Hassell, Actress and Ricardo Villalobos – though often as abstract qualities: small sounds become big while big ones recede into fine-grained rhythm. Minimalism is key to hearing the details: crackling electronics, inhalation, and sighs reverberate within vast spaces and on a foundation of rhythm. This restraint highlights Villain’s tendency to surgically separate sounds and their ghostly sound-memory doppelgängers according to frequencies. Paradoxically, every artifact, as a memory’s approximation, can be heard with utmost precision.

For Villain, memory in sound appears to sit comfortably behind the mixing console of a dub lab, expertly and unpredictably controlling volumes, textures, filters and all other parameters, known and unknown, in an ever-mutating recall.