Sure, once you hear that Silje Nes hails from the tiny coastal town of Liekanger, Norway, her music seems to echo out of some vast snowy terrain, a lonely expression of arctic life amidst all those fjords and floes. With her hushed vocals and spindly strings, she sounds like some miniature snow sprite or white gypsy fox dancing on the tundra, bright northern lights sparkling like jewels overhead.
But that’s just one, rather mystical way of listening, and it misses a lot of what matters in this music. Nes is not just another Scandinavian siren, but a tough, forward-thinking musician whose music could just as easily have emerged from Brooklyn, Glasgow, or Berlin (where she now lives). She records through an Mbox and Logic in a home studio, down a long hallway behind seven locked doors (according to her MySpace page), and her music speaks to what seems both exciting and lonely about the digital era. If her songs conjure up vast spaces and intense emotions, it is because they explore the possibilities of life lived through a laptop; via the isolation of the home studio, inner space becomes sonic space becomes the loss and wonder of a thoroughly modern world.
Nes is a multi-instrumentalist who composes through recording, by layering and looping both traditional sounds and snippets of digital noise. Her new album Opticks has been characterized as a “folk-electronic” hybrid, but perhaps a better phrase would be “romantic digitalism,” if only for its wider implications. Throughout, human sounds morph into artificial ones, to the point at which you can no longer tell the difference between expression and its programming. Nes does this best with her own already ethereal voice, which she subtly manipulates into eerie, abstract forms. But she similarly works over her entire gamut of classical instruments (guitars, drums, xylophones, concertinas, flutes, and trumpets) and her quirky set of found sounds (pots, jewelry, waves, etc.). In the end, each song sounds both warm and mechanical, human and strange, but always in motion, always drawing you in with its subtle dramas of digital loss and gain.
In other words, Opticks seems to be an album about lost connections and communications, and its constant layering of sound — now aching and sharp, now murky and distant — beautifully conveys its deeper sentiments. At times, the digital process seems to bury the possibilities of expression, but it also generates completely new emotions and sensations. In fact, the album takes its name from Isaac Newton’s 1704 scientific treatise on the refraction of light into component colors (think 9th-grade physics or Pink Floyd cover art). Nes — like some mystic geometer of the sonic soul — uses the technology of the studio to break sound apart and put all back together again in more vibrant ways.
Take, for example, album opener “The Glass Harp,” which starts off like a slow-burning rocker about growing together and falling apart. It begins with a simple alternating guitar figure overlaid with quick squalls of metal and the growing rumble of the sea. At the halfway point, though, Nes bursts it all open with a simultaneous blast of feedback and strings, as if the song itself has been refracted into separate components. “The Shades” takes a different approach, gently scaffolding one thin tone on top of the other — some vocal, some electronic — against a throbbing backdrop of processed clicks and bleeps. The effect is at once ghostly and celestial, as if the song is haunted by a choir of lost digital angels, each with a different indecipherable warning.
And then there’s “Crystals,” the album’s first single, with its bright pop bounce and simple observations about how people move and change. The song presents the closest thing on the album to an artistic statement: “I lay stones in a row, and it’s all I have.” I first thought Nes was singing “I lay tones in a row,” which might be a more fitting description of her method, but the sentiment is the same, and she seems here to be doing for indie music what minimalists such as Cage, Rauschenberg, and Ono once did for other arts: using simple combinations of sound and noise to bust open our sense of its possibilities.
Nes doesn’t reveal much about herself in her songs, and her lyrics are often indecipherable, but this seems to fit her interest in isolation and its possibilities. In some tracks, she seems adrift in her own headspace, contemplating shifting moods of loneliness, insecurity, yearning, and calm (“Symmetry of Empty Space,” “Branches”); in others, she comes across like some surrealist hipster, sauntering down the street, taking in the shapes and colors (“Rewind,” “Silver > Blue”). Either way, I dig her avant-garde sensibility, and I love that she’s not afraid to confront human emotion in abstract ways. Her musical methods reflect a compelling view of the world; everything here seems programmed and static, and yet the results are full of spontaneity and wonder. In the end, Opticks sounds nothing like Norway, but it’s still quite a trip. Artful, spooky, groovy, human, it sounds like anywhere and nowhere on Earth.
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