Cyano

talking about my new album, pt.1

Hello readers,

I’m very happy to share that I will be releasing a new solo record on Oct 2nd with RVNG Intl. titled Cyano. It is the first time that my songwriting and singing meet my ambient electronic music. We are now sharing a new single called “Sing To”. My best friend, collaborator, and partner, V Haddad, created this experimental film for the song. In V’s words the video is “an abstracted narrative of two people trying to connect through each others memories”.

Though the album you will hear in October was recorded in a month last winter, Cyano has been a very long term project - about 8 years in the making. It started for me as an imaginary sci-fi world where two characters go on a journey to uncover the buried history of their utopian planet that is beautifully symbiotic, but void of individuality and shared emotional nuances. The main character in my imaginary world was inspired by botanist Anna Atkins, who has a story that deeply resonated with me. A lover of science imbuing her work with inherent emotion. She is widely regarded as the first person to create a photobook. Raised by her father after her mother’s untimely death. Using the cyanotype process, Anna’s work is both passionately scientific and deeply poetic and feeling. It was seeing Anna’s botanical documentation of algae that made me imagine a way that my sci-fi friends could learn to communicate their feelings to each other through a connection to the plants and nature in their own world, creating a kind of hazy transmission to share experiences and profound emotions, sort of like a spiritual postcard. Cyano as music imagines the beginning stages of relearning how to communicate emotionally, with oneself and with others. Instead of a world that is perfectly balanced, it introduces variance, the entire spectrum of light to dark, joy to grief. There is a lot of meaning behind the music, and I am happy to share that, but I also hope that Cyano can be a place for listeners to explore their own imagination with an open ended and malleable experience.

Over the years of thinking about and exploring Cyano, the story for me became more and more personal. As I enter a new chapter of my own life, this profound feeling of growth and change is ever present with me, and I have been on my own journey to relearn the ways in which I communicate with myself. I am reminded a lot lately how beautiful and exciting it can be to change. To feel like a beginner again, to get to learn yourself better as time goes by and as you age. It is a very underrated gift. Musically, I am sharing the very personal process of those beginning moments of breakthrough, sharing how my voice develops alongside the story of a world whose voice is slowing fading back to it. My curiosity around how insightful individuality is connected to collective identity is also being explored. Maybe there is a world within us all.

photo by V

In 2019, V and I knew there was going to be a new moon very close to the winter solstice (darkest day of the year), so we wanted to travel somewhere where we could fully experience that level of double darkness. We flew to Reykjavík and drove for 8 hours north up to Bolungarvik, Iceland in a tiny car, through the worst snowstorm I have ever experienced (thank you guardian angel). We spent the solstice and the new moon in the northernmost place we could manage to access and basked in the darkness. Filming, photographing, and working on some very early exploratory sounds of Cyano. I wanted to experience a landscape that felt as extreme as it also was tranquil. I became very inspired by this trip when imagining the emotional tone of the music and imagery for the record, and it served as an anchor for my continued exploration of the project.

phone pics from iceland, 2019

Last year I processed 14 of the photographs I made on that Iceland trip, wrote a 14 line poem compiled from dozens of unnamed word documents about Cyano I had written over the years, and intuitively matched the words and images to the 14 tracks on Cyano. We’re creating a beautiful risograph printed zine with these words and images to go with the release. I am very proud of it! Here are some images of that.

I wanted the visual identity of Cyano to reflect something in that grey area between our world, and something beyond it. Familiar but mysterious. The record is meant to be very abstract but with a lot of room to relate back to either real life or an imaginary place. Abstract existence, moving through realms, reality just being the tip of the iceberg, and emotions feeling as mysterious as magical spells, have all been interests of mine for quite a while now. There is an Etel Adnad quote in the back of the zine, which I feel touches on the spirit of Cyano in a deeply satisfying way.

"Night is an element of love; like fog. It liberates space, lets freshness cross it. Its magic elevates the body, brings to the surface the mystery of just being alive, being. With or without stars and galaxies, the sky becomes a private territory—the imagination’s own scope. These are moments when one reaches all there is between the moon and oneself." — Etel Adnan

There is a lot of love in Cyano. Love for live, for earth, for emotions. Love for oneself and for the people we share experiences with. Love for the darkness and the pain of living, the growing and the changing. Love for imagining and not knowing.

Thank you so much for listening, watching, reading. Lots more to come <3

Emily