As we explained back in August, Reetta Hotti has been releasing music under her own name for the past few years but her latest incarnation Longing Louisa explores a different side to Reetta’s music.
Her debut album ‘Waterphile’ is “an ode to water”, H2O being a “symbol” to her, that she is drawn to wherever she goes and that’s how the word waterphile came to mind. I’ll take it over hydrophobe any day.
It seems the album became something of an obsession for her and was made mainly in solitude after she quit her job, went AWOL from family and friends and dedicated herself to “learning new stuff about sound synthesis etc,…watched a hundred editorials, read books, went for long walks, listened to almost no other music than my demos since somehow I had no space for it in my head; Just completely dove into my own universe and stayed there for a year.”
That’s pretty much in the Roy Neary class in Close Encounters of the Third Kind with his Devil’s Tower made out of mashed potato. And look what happened to him. He’s in his own universe now, good and proper.
She self-produced it as well and much of what you hear is all her own work, having “made my own bed and couldn’t escape lying in it”.
She regards it as a combination of electronic indie, art pop and ambient and my opinion is that she is spot on.
Her style with Longing Louisa is to interpret the feeling of longing that has always been with her – for the past, for the future, or for some form of alternative reality – into her songs along with a trademark sense of melancholy emphasised by fogginess, blurriness, and dull, hollow sounds.
You can easily drag melancholy and those particular attendant features too far down the alleyway of despair and make a song sound like a soundtrack to a Jack the Ripper movie or TV show.
But LL avoids that with a bright, chirpy, tuneful song full of syncopated melody and rhythm.
It’s in three parts like a mini operetta and with a lengthy instrumental bridge between parts 1 and 2: the first a plea to bury that hatchet; the second the realisation there is nothing to bury anyway; and the third the heavenly instrumental bliss that proclaims that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds and why didn’t we see that before now? Or is that third part merely a representation of the longing for that state of affairs, Louisa?
That’s my first base take on it anyway but yours may well differ considerably.
Technically there are a couple of very minor concerns. The first is LL’s propensity to insert little electronic ‘noises off’ here and there almost as if she feels compelled to, when they aren’t really. They are mainly in the opening section.
Secondly, a rather strange accent that appears on certain words, again in the first part and which sounds like an amalgam of Neighbours’ Ramsey Street ‘Orrstralian’ and what Charlize might say to Pik in a Sandton coffee shop. “Someday, I would laark to”…
Nothing too serious; just slight irritations.
You’ll have to listen to it a few times to get it and it is definitely album rather than single material.
It’s one for the thinkers and debaters rather than the instant gratification seekers and isn’t going to top any chart list anytime soon (it’s nearly seven minutes long anyway). What it will do is to establish her instantly in the pantheon of erudite Finnish artists that merely seek the gratification of having their work mulled over and found to be very agreeable by the cognoscenti. Or by me.
(Continues after the Spotify link)
‘Waterphile’ is out now on the Soliti label.
Find Longing Louisa on:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/longinglouisa/
