An artist’s debut record can often be a culmination of their writing up until that point, giving them years and sometimes decades to get things right before they ultimately put their music out into the world. With a follow-up record, there’s not only pressure to not only repeat the success of the first album, but improve upon it. All this requires starting the writing process fresh, which is exactly what Carmen Villain (aka Carmen Maria Hillestad) has done on her sophomore record, Infinite Avenue. For this album, she’s gone out on her own — and learned to follow her intuition.
Hillestad made her debut in 2013 with the impressive Sleeper, a densely packed and guitar-driven forty two minutes of hazy rock hypnotics. The freeform fuzz that tethered each of the songs together always felt focused and purposeful, evincing the feeling of being trapped without subjecting the listener to the claustrophobia of that experience. Hillestad was always in control of the noise but on Infinite Avenue, the Norway-based artist has no band to get lost in or hide behind– Hillestad’s voice and performances emerge from the psychedelic miasma front and center.
Touring Sleeper on and off from 2013 to 2015, Hillestad supported fellow Scandinavian artists Neneh Cherry and Jenny Hval, and got to road-test her material as a full four-piece band. It was her first time touring ever and she says it was those experiences that helped inform the direction her next work would take. “Last time around I had to say no to a few things because I couldn’t afford to get my band there,” she says. “Four people can get expensive.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPdVmR0AzZ8
So the recording sessions that followed her tour began by taking that into account, with Hillestad writing and recording at home alone, reworking her sound into a much more flexible iteration.
But Hillestad’s incentives for paring her music down weren’t solely economical. While Sleeper involved a number of session musicians and was co-produced with Serena Maneesh’s Emil Nikolaisen, Hillestad wrote, recorded and produced everything on Infinite Avenue herself, a process she says is the result of a completely new approach to songwriting, and the creative thrill she gets from learning new things.
Explaining that much of her learning happens on the fly — either through patience or thanks to some Youtube tutorials — Hillestad says the discovery that comes along with learning a new instrument or program was central to her writing process this time around. “There’s definitely a lot of messing around and trying different things,” she explained. “Most of this record is written as something that comes out of a loop or a beat. Something starts and then it triggers a wave of trying out different things.”
So much of the record is rooted in discovery that save for “Red Desert,” “Quietly,” “Water” and the title track, the album features very little in the way of Sleeper’s primary instrument, the guitar.
Instead, the music on the album gravitates toward more ambient electronic sounds and methods of songwriting. Instrumental track “The Moon Will Always Be There” begins with a sustained hum from a cello and morphs into a beat-forward and ornately mesmerizing night out. “Connected” is propelled by a glimmering, barely-there piano part, acting as a showcase for Hillestad’s expressive voice. The dreamy, swirling qualities of her debut are still here, but they’ve been rendered with a brand new but complementary palette of sounds.
She beams when she talks about her new direction, saying “I’m veering more and more towards more electronic things because it’s a great way to try out different sounds and manipulate sounds and it’s just a really fun way to work.”
Going into recording without a plan, Hillestad writes and produces at the same time. It’s a kind of unconventional approach, but one that allows her to follow her own intuition. “I have it in my head and the song gets there by basically just working on it,” she says. Elaborating, she adds that “if a tiny bit of noise works well some place I might leave it or sometimes it might surprise me, weird stuff might happen and that might enhance it but i didn’t expect it to happen. It’s a bit of a patchwork. It’s all about the result and that it feels right.”
That same intuition is what led to tour-mate Jenny Hval ending up on album highlight, “Borders.” Hillestad knows herself and her abilities well enough to follow a song from a loop to a complete piece, and can also trusts when she’s not the right person to sing a part. “Of course [Hval] delivered these incredible melodies that I couldn’t have come up with, because she has a very interesting and amazing way of coming up with melodies for things. The rhythm and intonations of the vocals are something that wouldn’t come naturally to me,” she said.
When asked about whether there’s a kind of harmony between the opportunity hinted by the album title and the openness of the production and arrangements themselves, Hillestad says that wasn’t her intent, but the more she’s thought about it, the more this record is the sound of her in control.
“I think I knew a lot less [during Sleeper] than I do now. This record is about having learned a lot about myself.”
Infinite Avenue is Out 9/8 on Smalltown Supersound. You can order it here and stream it below.
