A Song For Friday: Astrid Sonne
Stunning new music from an electronic composer turned singer-songwriter
I’m always interested in artists who show new sides of themselves, as when Molly Joyce, who I knew for her solo violin music, announced herself as an art rocker with her classic 2020 album, Breaking And Entering. Now we have Astrid Sonne, a Danish composer and violist, who has been making a name for herself mostly with electronic music, but who today gives us Great Doubt, her first album as a singer-songwriter. The somber and dreamy album features her warm, but affectless mezzo-soprano in a variety of settings that are at least adjacent to chamber-folk, art-pop, and other genres that can’t quite contain her.
Give a listen to the closing track on the album, the stunningly spare Say You Love Me, which features an electronic drum beat, piano chords - which somehow manage to never settle on the beat - viola, and bass, giving plenty of space for her almost distracted musings: “Say that you love me…say that you…need me…I’m talking to you…I’m talking to you.”
To get an idea of Sonne’s wide-ranging interests, note that Give My All paraphrases a Mariah Carey song and Do You Wanna features Jasper Marsalis (AKA Slauson Malone 1) on guitar. Great Doubt will surely introduce this protean artist to a bigger audience, a well-deserved reward for taking steps in a new direction.
Is Astrid Sonne talking to you? Let me know in the comments.