GALÁN / VOGT: The Sweet Wait
Editions Furioso
Karen Vogt has one of those voices that sounds incredible no matter the context. Of late she's been crafting dreampop with Heligoland, her outfit with instrumentalist Steve Wheeler and whose Robin Guthrie-produced releases are well worth tracking down. Vogt shifts gears somewhat for this latest project, a collaboration with Spanish ambient composer Pepo Galán the two undertook remotely from the Australian singer's home in Paris and his in Málaga.
A number of guests contribute to the release, among them Mark Beazley (bass), Jolanda Moletta (backing vocals), Simon McCorry (cello), and Achim Färber (drums), but for the most part The Sweet Wait is the sound of Vogt and Galán presenting one enrapturing soundscape after another. As if to accentuate the project's ambient dimension, Akira Rabelais was engaged to create codas for the songs ending the sides on the vinyl version of the release (the album-closing “Above the Aether” bears his unmistakable imprint), while Rafael Anton Irisarri handled mastering.
Wisely, Málaga, whose work has appeared as part of Kompakt's Pop Ambient series, doesn't overwhelm Vogt's voice, and so each song is graced by her tremulous ache and quiver; even when the music swells epically, her delivery ensures a feeling of intimacy remains. Generally, however, her voice suspends itself across a shimmering base, with the listener more engulfed than enveloped by the two. Processed guitar, piano, and electronic textures blur together in the backdrop, over which Vogt's slow unfurl appears, her voice positioned so high in the mix it feels like it's whispering in your ear.
With her commanding lead buttressed by Moletta, “Starseed” proves particularly seductive, especially when the voices collect into an ethereal choir intoning lines such as “Fear is what will tear you apart / Don't put the stars out, let them shine in the sky.” As the two sing “To get what you want, you don't have to plead / Just loosen your grip and let it be,” the song begins to suggest the kind of drama Shirley Manson would bring to a Garbage song were it ambient-styled. Uncertainty, self-questioning, solitude, and letting go emerge as themes in Vogt's lyrics, though more likely your focus will be on the mode of delivery than the actual words.
An epic cauldron of symphonic proportions generates a slow-burn in “Opa,” the sound mass so huge the voice merges with it rather than wafts over it. Elsewhere, the collaborators opt for a simpler sound design; the arrangement of “Nacre,” for instance, consists of little more than vocals (by Vogt and Moletta) and reverberant guitar shadings. On a largely beats-free recording, "Between the Tides” stands out for including drumming by Färber, and the additional impact guitar brings to the arrangement nudges the song in a Heligoland direction.
While one could spend time trying to classify the material, it resists being easily slotted into ambient, dreampop, shoegaze, or any other category. The Sweet Wait could be described as an alluring set of vocal-driven meditations, but one is better advised to simply surrender to the music's intoxicating pull (see the particularly potent “Hypnagogia,” for example) than waste energy on genre labeling. The Sweet Wait is available digitally, of course, but is best experienced as a vinyl release, as its creators envisioned it (as the project progressed, it came to feel naturally conducive to an album format and so was shaped to be heard that way). Adding to the appeal of the physical presentation, the forty-two-minute album's pressed on white vinyl in a package featuring striking images by French photographer Aurélie Scouarnec.September 2021