Lisa LERKENFELDT
“Collagen”

The full-length debut of Lisa Lerkenfeldt’s sanguine ambient drift marks the Aussie artist’s most significant release, slotting neatly into the roster of Félicia Atkinson & Bartolomé Sanson’s Shelter Press, and somewhere between Gas, Beatriz Ferreyra and Ben Bondy on your shelf.
Effectively her first album, proper, ‘Collagen’ introduces Lerkenfeldt’s sound like a wild meadow somewhere between the fields of modern classical, ambient, and musique concrète. Aspiring to “elevate the everyday”, her music feels naturally, gently ripe with variegated in/organic textures and slow, hypnotic melody that stealthily attunes listeners to her wavelength in a manner that she’s roughly finessed on previous tapes and digital releases with native label Longform Editions and Vienna Press and Canada’s Aught Void.
As the tracks unfold, Lerkenfeldt’s washed out strings and blanched electronics waver the weather vane between sombre and melancholy with a real windswept, isolationist feel that perhaps suggest best results when immersed by yourself, not as a communal experience. More like a solo hike with headphones or sheltering in front of a shifting landscape, the album plays thru Gas-like string pads gilded with elusive vocoder vox of ‘In Her Hair’ before dematerialising into elemental abstraction for 9 minutes of ‘Collagen’, whereas ‘Gates of Desire’ prove a tidier knack for arranging classically puckered ambient-pop keys, and the B-side expresses more liminal, hypnagogic states in the creaking gloom of ‘The Weight of History’. It all shares the same, rare air and sensitively perhaps errs best to the side of melancholy than anything overbearingly glum.