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(2022) Susanna – Elevation + Elevation Extended EP
Review:
A special album in Susanna‘s body of work, Baudelaire & Piano pared her music down to its essence. Performing its ghostly songs live inspired her to dig deeper into Baudelaire’s work, and on Elevation, she sets more of Anthony Mortimer’s translations of the poet’s classic volume Flowers of Evil to music. Understandably, the album has quite a bit in common with Baudelaire & Piano, down to the sinuous black-and-white artwork by occultist artist Cameron that conveys the sensual minimalism of the music perfectly. On pieces such as “Invitation to the Voyage,” the purity of Susanna’s vocals once again provides a striking contrast to lyrics like “A secret that lies in your dangerous eyes/And shines through the veil of tears” as a piano melody unfolds seductively. But where Baudelaire & Piano featured Susanna on her own, this time she brings in the collaborators who helped her bring that album to the stage to help give a broader scope to the shadings of danger, beauty, love, and lust within Flowers of Evil. Stina Stjern, who worked with Susanna on Garden of Earthly Delights, contributes field recordings and soundscapes, while composer/improviser Delphine Dora performs several poems in their native French. Both of them heighten Elevation‘s mystical qualities, whether it’s the way Stjern’s field recordings of birds add a hallucinatory feel to the title track’s longing for renewal, or the way Dora’s vocals entwine over the censer-like fog of a droning organ on “Ciel Brouillé.” Susanna described the album as “an experimental hymn,” and its emphasis on Flowers of Evil’s spiritual side is apparent even on the pieces that don’t include any of Baudelaire’s words. The tender melodies and soft textures of Stjern’s “Rose-Pale Dawn” capture the hopefulness of an early morning, while the unsettled tones and feral samples on “In Shared Ecstasy” hint at the peril spelled out on the album’s final track, “Destruction.” The varied yet unified perspectives Susanna, Stjern, and Dora lend to their source material make Elevation more than an echo of Baudelaire & Piano — instead, it’s a celebration of creative interplay, translation, and transformation that does justice to all the artists involved. — AMG
Track List:
Elevation
01 - Alchemy of Suffering
02 - Ciel Brouillé
03 - Rose-Pale Dawn
04 - L’aube Spirituelle
05 - Elevation
06 - Alchimie De La Douleur
07 - Le Possédé
08 - Light Up Your Eyes
09 - Invitation to the Voyage
10 - Le Vin Des Amants
11 - In Shared Ecstasy
12 - Destruction
Elevation Extended EP
01 - Come Avalanche
02 - Elevation
03 - Alchimie de la Douleur
04 - News to the Spirit
05 - Le Possédé
Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk, chamber pop
Country: Oslo, Norway
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)
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