Back in 2022 we wrote about The Carillion Towers, the debut album by Chicago-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Emma Hospelhorn, AKA Em Spel. A release which had a “grounding in both pop and avant garde styles,” as we described, with collaborators such as V.V. Lightbody and Katinka Kleijn blurring the line between avant garde and pop sensibilities to welcome the listener into the record’s unique world. “Songs which do not hide their classical or experimental underpinnings but present them to the listener as things to be approached with curiosity,” we concluded.”Only once this has been achieved are the higher themes brought into relief.”
Described as an “avant-folk story,” latest single ‘My Oldest Friend’ builds upon the foundations The Carillion Towers. Out via Carillonia Records, the song was recorded with Brian Deck and sees Jesse Langen (acoustic guitar), V.V. Lightbody (electric guitar), Mabel Kwan (synths) and Eric Ridder (drums) lend their talents to form a sound full of subtle richness. “Come to a tunnel / Hello, tunnel / Hello,” Hospelhorn sings in the opening lines, guiding the audience toward the mysterious heart of the track. “Walk off the road / And climb, and climb, and fall into a hole.” From there the sound simmers with patient rhythms, its cryptic tone vacillating between welcoming and strange, never quite settling into either.
The song took a while to reach this version, evolving slowly towards the vision Hospelhorn had in mind. “I recorded the song last winter, but something about the way I had orchestrated it didn’t sit right with me on repeated listens,” she explains. “There was a quality of strangeness that I feel when I perform that was somehow missing from the recording: I was imagining something green and living growing through the song the way moss grows in a tunnel.” Hospelhorn continued working at it, passing flutes through pedals to create novel drone textures and testing different layers of digital synths. It was only when Brian Deck remixed these results into their final form that the song matched the feel Hospelhorn had been searching for: “moody, expansive, ever shifting.”