Vanessa Amara Captures Your Soul

Vanessa Amara's music channels a mellowed-out emotional intensity that is brimming with humanity. I wish I had the right vocabulary to best encapsulate the elusive Danish duo’s music that is at once a blast from the past and simultaneously a beacon of the future — except one is left with an unreliable narration of their memories when their soundscapes are presented to your ears. 

Through choppy arrangements that resemble a continuous sketch in motion, where each stroke is unexpected, their music combines classical elements with glitchy electronic undertones. Eventually, you find yourself looking at a larger picture; in this instance, you find yourself leaning in to listen a little deeper, compelled to comprehend the intentionality of their music.

Image Credit: Bandcamp

I rarely use Spotify these days to find new music, so it was fate that their most recent album, café LIFE, caught my attention. There was an unadorned truth to "Don't Let This Feeling" when it reached my ears. In addition to being ambient and classical, with the piano and organ keys taking center stage, it nods to hyperpop and the heyday of Majestic Casual, except they threw in some oddities. The song's lyrics, "don't let this feeling, capture your soul," felt very appropriate in the political tumult of the times, giving faith and an idealism of utopia one can wish for.

This was enough for me to delve into the scarce information available online about the Copenhagen duo that has been putting out music for a decade, where Birk Gjerlufsen and Sebastián Santillana have found themselves to be maestros of the unorthodox under the label Posh Isolation.

In café LIFE, each track metamorphoses fluidly, with sampling that slightly reminds me of The Avalanches, atmospheric strings, traverses one back to a utopia that one can only imagine. “This is what you do” calls to a clubbier version of The Field’s music, with his signature minimal ambient techno on loop, that lingers on till it turns glitchy, and "Thinking of you" is as if an electronic vocalist chose to interrupt an orchestral performance and the musicians just went with it. There are 14 songs on this album, with all of them except the last track, “When you love someone”, being under 3 minutes. Interestingly, as the rat race blindsides us, their music would be a good fit for hopecore videos. This record deftly navigates an intimacy of love and life without being overly serious about it, all the while maintaining an abstract quality that never rests on any one end of the narrative or structural spectrum.  café Life is captivatingly beautiful in all its peculiarities. Its disparate elements come together in a stunning symphony of the surreal, and you accept it just because.