Songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Emma Hospelhorn is well known around the Chicago music scene. Besides playing the flute in avant-classical group Ensemble Dal Niente and leading her talents to records by the likes of Advance Base and V.V. Lightbody, she also collaborates with cellist Katinka Kleijn in the tech-experimental duo The Machine is Neither. But as if this wasn’t enough, Hospelhorn also records solo music under the moniker Em Spel, and this spring sees the release of her debut album, The Carillion Towers.
The Em Spel sound has grounding in both pop and avant garde styles, and Hospelhorn calls upon many of her collaborators to realise its subtle yet intricately ambitious chamber folk sound. The Carillion Towers sees V.V. Lightbody (guitars, additional synths, vocals) Katinka Kleijn (cello), Eric Ridder (drums, additional vocals) Matt Oliphant (horn), Caitlin Edwards (violin) and Brian Deck (additional synthesis) all lend a hand, their inputs integrated into Hospelhorn’s arrangements with an organic sophistication. Songs which do not hide their classical or experimental underpinnings but present them to the listener as things to be approached with curiosity. Only once this has been achieved are the higher themes brought into relief.
The organic nature of The Carillion Towers has roots in Richard Powers‘s 2018 novel, The Overstory, which Hospelhorn was reading around the time of its inception. A novel about trees in all of their slow complexity and fundamental significance, Powers illuminates the true beauty of the arboreal world, admiring their long history, their surprising ingenuity, the patterns of their branches and roots and leaves. One thread of the novel explores how trees communicate with one another and the surrounding environment via chemical signals, a concept which resonated deeply.
“A loop I had been working on felt to me like the slow heartbeat of a tree,” Hospelhorn explains, “and I wondered if there was a musical way to mimic the chemical ways trees communicate.” The challenge directly seeded the single ‘Overstory’ but also inspired the songs which followed in a less direct manner. Shaping the way in which they approached the matters at hand. “One question that book forces us to ask is, whose land are we living on?” Hospelhorn continues. “A lot of the songs on this record ask that question in one way or another. All of these songs are about relationships—with ourselves, with each other, with institutions, with our societies, and with the natural world.”
Album art by Jim Campbell