Bleep

Clarissa Connelly’s music suggests a wide, studious array of inspirations. Among them, inflections of folk, synthpop, new age, and confessional yet impressionist lyrics. She cites Kate Bush, Mike Oldfield as well as Scottish hills and Danish burial mounds as influence. She has created a soundtrack for an exhibition on Magic: The Gathering, and her Vandringen app combines art and orienteering, where works appear only when in range of specific sites. Her third album The Voyager combines all this and more, and with the glue of her masterfully modern pop songwriting, these disparate and eclectic elements make perfect sense together.

Like a digital archaeologist, Connelly wanders through genres, landscapes, and histories with a MIDI orchestra at her fingertips. The Voyager puts software and acoustic instruments in a fantastical embrace, verging on bright, inquisitive sound collage but remaining firmly pop as she weaves a catchy lyric through the pastoral views of baroque inflected guitars and strings swooping across the land. ‘Holler’ descends into this world with cascades of piano caught in a cyclical composition, expanded in ‘Bargain’ with glossy bass and synth plucks, the optimistic sheen of synthpop translated literally to a new age.

While employing retro sounds, Connelly never relies on nostalgia, instead preferring they “sound as though they could be played at any time in history.” Her sophisticatedly subtle manipulations on ‘Theresa!’ make muted bass and zany guitar shreds unbound by time, and similarly on ‘Latitude’ with lines coming unpredictably from voices in all directions. A mystical force is embedded in the strength of bewitching vocals and rolling, hammering rhythms on ‘The Fallen Land’, meanwhile ‘The Hills are Crying’ is a display of musical agility as whimsical harmonies rotate through intersecting lyrics.

Clarissa Connelly comes from a new digital vanguard of pop experimenters, creating a refreshing recalibration of time tested sounds on The Voyager.