#24 - elusin - Elskling
You’re sitting on a grassy mound in the middle of a snowy forest clearing. The air is cool, a gentle wind blows around you and tickles the trees. You can hear animals near you, maybe foxes or rabbits, brushing softly against crackly leaves, scraping the dirt. You’re sitting there alone but caught in this invisible orchestra of nature, every sound wrapping together in a quiet symphony of life.
A similar kind of frozen forest region is a landscape in one of Elusin’s music videos, and it’s the setting I imagine for all of her enchantingly foggy, snow-streaked music. I stumbled on the Norwegian-American musician one day while excavating deep into a SoundCloud rabbit hole, where the oddest gems I normally find are cursed mixes and futuristic elevator music. Elusin’s songs are practically the opposite of that outsider gawkiness and asphyxiating low-end chaos — her vocals are whisker-thin, the soundscapes slow and sweet. It’s surprising to learn that she’s worked multiple times with Sematary, the Salem-inspired horrorcore rapper whose rap is so bass-baked it sounds like a parody. Her end product is closer to an Imogen Heap who spends her days living in a cabin meditating with woodland creatures.
“Elskling,” which translates from Norwegian to “darling,” is my favorite song of hers. The vocals are split between English and Norwegian, but it doesn’t really matter because she deploys her voice like an instrument. Every line is smothered in so much reverb, it seems to trail off endlessly, the syllables growing smaller and glassier until the next lyric drifts in to continue the fragile fractal. She dances between angel-high registers as a bittersweet synth unfurls gently in the background. There’s a second version of the song where the synths are largely replaced by what sounds like a warm string instrument, which makes the track feel even more like a remote hollow of woodland and voice. Listening to the song while walking around the squalid, congested corridors of New York City makes me want to be spirited away to Norway so I can spend a year in a hut alone, reading and tending to my fire. File under “witch folk”?
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