When I was a kid I wanted to be an astronomer and spent all my time memorising the constellations. Not that it did me much good.
That obscure fact is one of the many and widely different reasons why I’m attracted to some songs: if they have a connection, actual or perceived, to the firmament and beyond. And especially right now with what’s going on in the solar system, these pesky interstellar visitors. I hope someone is playing the five tones out at Devil’s Tower.
Danish artist Nemo (Emma Louise Ottsen Knudsen) appears to have a similar bent towards the heavens too, and also to the colour blue, one that I guess turns up in more songs than any other; it has so many permutations.
And it is what drew my attention to Danish alternative artist’s debut album ‘Blue is the color of infinity’
In titling her debut album ‘Blue is the color of infinity’ Nemo recognises that blue is of the Earth (sky, ocean, sea– well not the North Sea of course) and equally that life may not end in our stratosphere and that there are wondrous opportunities facing us as we return to the Moon and look towards human exploration of the planets and beyond.
The short opening track, the vocally and musically disjointed ‘No Sphere’, brought to mind the sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey in which the top scientist is making his way to the Moon on a shuttle flight to see for himself ‘TMA 1’, the metallic monolith that has been unearthed and which has been clearly left eons ago by a superior race to be found by humankind only when it is ready.
You can’t help but get the feeling that’s where we are right now.
Other tracks that could have accompanied scenes in that film include ‘Airborne’ and could envisage her as an interplanetary voyager reporting from the front line, while others go off in a different direction altogether and might belong in an obscure road movie.
There is lushness in the composition and production in all the tracks while many have the cinematic quality you would expect to accompany the subject matter.
And yet she offsets that with a vocal suggestive not of a learned narrator but of a wide eyed teenager keen to embrace the unknown. The contrast works well.
I’m not sure at all how to ‘classify’ her. The generic ‘art-pop’ artist will suffice at a pinch but there is a formal composer, an electronic experimentalist and even a mainstream pop artist all caught up in her frame struggling to get out and be heard. And that’s what makes her unique.
Some of her stuff is almost Lynchian in style, for example the guitar/bass intro and underpinning rhythm on the final track ‘Supernova’, which is why I gave it the nod as the sample track.
Actually I do her a disservice. This two minute review is wholly inadequate for a well thought out, written and recorded debut that demands your full intention.
And why the moniker ‘Nemo’, or is that just ironically self-deprecatory? She’s nobody’s fool.
(Continues after the Spotify link)
The album is out on Danish label Rhizome.
Find her on:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/official.nemo.music/
Facebook (private account): https://www.facebook.com/ottsenknudsen
