Carmen Villain

Carmen Villain, based in Oslo, functions as both creator and shaper of sound, possessing a refined sensitivity to intricate atmospheric textures that has rendered her work progressively more immersive. The singer/songwriter’s initial releases, 2013’s Sleeper and 2017’s Infinite Avenue, wove experimental rock, dream pop, electro-acoustic explorations, and muted character portraits into mutable strata whose hallucinatory depth remained authentic to the word. Those extended trajectories and finely etched timbres foreshadowed the oneiric environments of 2019’s Both Lines Will Be Blue, which introduced the fusion of dub, ambient, fourth world, and kosmische later expanded on 2022’s Only Love from Now On.

Carmen Hillestad entered the world in the United States to parents of Mexican and Norwegian heritage. Early songwriting drew from the prose of Charles Bukowski and Mikhail Bulgakov; while employed as a model she began testing loops, vocal treatments, and drum programming. Once she elected to release material under the name Carmen Villain, sessions for her first album took place at multiple facilities, among them Oslo’s CSX Dungeon. There she enlisted Serena Maneesh’s Emil Nikolaisen and Prins Thomas as co-producers and handled guitar, bass, keyboards, percussion, and drum machines herself. Issued in March 2013 on Smalltown Supersound, Sleeper reflected touchstones that stretched from Sun City Girls and Sonic Youth to Broadcast and This Heat. Villain followed with the reflective 2017 EP Planetarium, whose pieces merged field recordings and acoustic-electronic instrumentation and later received remixes from Gigi Masin. That September brought the second album, the muted Infinite Avenue, which incorporated input from Jenny Hval, experimental house producer Matt Karmil, and Deathprod’s Helge Sten.

After completing a commission with U.K. producer Parris for the Ultima Contemporary Music Festival, Villain joined Thomas and Chilean-Norwegian flutist Johanna Scheie Orellana to shape the third album, Both Lines Will Be Blue. The July 2019 set comprised structured and spontaneous instrumentals that folded field recordings, zither, and electronics into its tranquil aura. A companion remix anthology containing reworkings by Parris, DJ Python, Karima F, and additional artists surfaced the following February. Villain reconvened with Orellana for Affection in a Time of Crisis, a work of granular synthesis, field recordings, and flute issued by Longform Editions in June 2020. That October she contributed to the Geographic North compilation A Little Night Music: Aural Apparitions from the Geographic North alongside Oliver Coates, Fennesz, and Lotus Plaza. January 2021 brought Sketch for Winter IX: Perlita, her installment in Smalltown Supersound’s winter-themed EP series. For the fourth album, February 2022’s Only Love from Now On, she again collaborated with Orellana and Arve Henriksen on expansive pieces that extended the methods explored on Both Lines Will Be Blue and subsequent releases.