Sunken Treasure: digging up long lost music

Hearing Stina Nordenstam’s childlike voice and extraordinary music for the first time tends to throw up questions of scale in the mind of the listener. Mystifyingly, there is something mighty and immeasurable about her sound, yet conversly she sings in intimate, hushed and fragile tones.

This is one for the dedicated listeners in the audience. Her words weave starry webs through emotional soundscapes, brooding and expansive. Her voice is soft and gentle in timbre and its patterns are delicately spun to appear almost weightless. The effect is mesmerising. Nobody sings like her.

She’s a very quiet force of nature made all the more alluring and persuasive for that uncommon level of restraint she displays. But there is magic everywhere in it. It’s like weather, her music, so natural and seemingly in tune with elemental forces.

There is a core stillness in all of her songs suggestive of an In a Silent Way-era Miles Davis. It really is that good. There are no proclamations. Instead the revelations come couched in whispers. She embodies the notion of there being beauty in all things including silence.

In photographs and videos she physically appears to occupy almost no space. Very few biographical details are available which only serves to heighten the mysteriousness of it all.There are no interviews, blogs, tweets or posts to cloud the picture.

There have only been six albums since 1991 and none at all since 2004. All six are worthy of investigation but the second, 1994’s And She Closed Her Eyes, is the certifiable masterpiece I’m referring to here.

Here’s where the years spent listening to her father’s jazz and classical records come to fruition. She builds an avant grade bridge from earlier influences to somewhere entirely new and completely her own.