sligtly bent corner, sealed During the recent months, we’ve had the good fortune to delve into some stunning work by artists that straddle the contexts of visual art and experimental sound. Now Von, the Italian imprint run by Carlos Casas and Nico Vascellari - dedicated to exploring the nuances of this fascinating and rich realm - brings us one of their most striking releases to date, The Haunted, by Camille Norment. A delicate and deeply intimate exploration of sonority and ambience on the glass harmonica and other sound sources, it’s one of the most immersive and mesmerizing releases we’ve heard all year. Issued on crystal clear vinyl in a highly limited edition, of which only 100 copies have been made available by the label and are being offered as a SoundOhm exclusive. Absolutely brilliant, truly essential, and not to be missed! This one isn’t going to sit around for long, so act fast!
Born in Maryland, U.S.A, Camille Norment is an Oslo-based multimedia artist who works with sound, installation, sculpture, drawing, performance and video, as well as having developed a singular practice as a musician and composer, producing solo works for glass harmonica - an musical instrument, invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1761, that uses a series of graduated glass bowls to produce tones via friction - as well as working within a regular trio with Vegar Vårdal and Håvard Skaset.
With a career largely focused on the visual realm - having slowly spread widely across the globe - sadly we haven’t heard nearly enough from Norment over the years. Following her debut, Toll, for Prisma Records in 2013, she graced a brilliant collaborative album for Important Records - Celadon - with Maja S.K. Ratkje, Jon Wesseltoft, and Per Gisle Galåen, leaving us desperate to hear more. It’s impossible to express how happy we are to have this latest entry in her discography in our hands.
The Haunted, stretching across two sides of the LP, is comprised of two distinct passages. The first is a work composed for the film, The Haunted, by director Saodat Ismailova, and encounters Norment’s glass harmonica generating shimmering long-tones, pulses, and ambient overtones, interspersed with a delicate texture drawing on field recordings and careful human interventions, creating a hauntingly imagistic sense of abstract place as it unfolds. Channeling the spirit of the first side of the album and expanding its world, the second side delves into a stunning, ghostly improvisational session. Filled with space and restraint, pointillistic sonorous objects and details defy location, converging within an unraveling tapestry of textural and tonal interventions that hang in the air.
Recalling everything from mid-century electroacoustic music, the sounds of the koto, gamelan, and Tibetan singing bowls, not to mention the more unexpected trajectories of ambient music and environmental recording, Camille Norment’s The Haunted is a work of rare artists that can’t be missed. Issued in a very special, limited edition on transparent vinyl by Von, accompanied by a beautifully printed color inner sleeve, there have only been 100 copies made available to the public by the label, and are being offered exclusively through SoundOhm.
