Standalone single ‘My Oldest Friend‘ furthered the style, and now Em Spel is gearing up to release brand new full-length Bird or Snake this spring via Birdwatcher Records. Lead single ‘Geographic’ might have the same invention and depth of The Carillion Towers, and even some similar ideas around interconnection, but in place of the organic imagery is something altogether more modern and synthetic. An exploration of being plugged into the contemporary world in all its overwhelming chaos, where every page is trying to sell you something, every scrap of data repurposed and sold in the name of understanding your desires. “Sometimes a song fragment writes itself and gets stuck in your head,” Hospelhorn explains. “That’s what happened to me with Geographic—something about that opening cadence grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. There’s the concept of a “digital world” that existed five, ten years ago, and then there’s whatever we have now. This is a song for everyone who is constantly bombarded by ads, by algorithms, by a million screens vying for your attention.”

Art by Jessica Roberts

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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.”

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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

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