Scandinavian multi-instrumentalist SYLVAINE is now unveiling the third new song taken from the upcoming fourth album ‘Nova‘. The album is scheduled for world-wide release on March 04, 2022 via Season of Mist.
SYLVAINE comments on the track: “Even without saying a single word, ‘Nova’ perfectly captures every single emotion that went into the creation of this fourth album of mine. It’s hard to put into words what this song means to me and just how much it makes me feel every single time I listen to it. All I will say is that nothing felt more fitting than to open such an incredibly personal album with such a naked piece of music, made up of the most personal instrument I could’ve chosen: my voice. My soul laid barer than ever before; this is ‘Nova.'”
To speak to SYLVAINE, the one-woman multi-instrumentalist, bandleader, and composer born Kathrine Shepard, is to speak to some spirit that exists beyond the veil of convention and stereotypes. This is not a woman playing to the vogue dark melodic folklorist trope that has become so prevalent in the metal scene but rather, this is a woman who is a serious and classically trained composer and arranger whose songs, that originate on unplugged electric guitars in lavender and black bedrooms, end up exploding against the unlimited conventions of what modern music can accomplish.
For some time, Kathrine Shepard has been seen as the petite pixie of the Norwegian black gaze scene but her small eleven features and light heartedness belie the woman warrior behind ‘Nova’, her complex and personal fourth release. Following her 2018 ‘Atoms Aligned Coming Undone’ release, Sylvaine (a play on the name of one of her beloved French poets, Paul Verlaine) gives us ‘Nova’, an album that is both a musical and personal reawakening of a singer/composer finding her way in this world.
The Lord of the Rings type choir arrangement heralds in the opening of her latest release as we the entranced listeners follow her to the realm of Lothlorien. The creation of this ambitious release began in 2019, before the world changed before all of our eyes. Experiencing a personal loss in a time the world was suffering a collective loss, SYLVAINE composed on her guitar and wrote in her notebooks, eventually leading her into the small rooms of Drudenhaus in early 2021. Sequestered away in the countryside of France, the Norwegian native and her musical cohorts would all contract Covid. Asthmatic since birth, our heroine isolated herself in a small room to score out the different soprano and alto melodies of an actual choir to make her vision for the opening track “Nova,” come to life. Sung in an imagined language, the syllables of NO-VA continued to emerge, suggesting to the singer something linguistically symbolic and important.
“I’ve been wanting to write a choir piece since my ‘Wistful’ days,” she says, “Just a purely vocal piece. I love harmonies and the most personal instrument you have is yourself, your voice. I wanted to really show who I am this time around.”
