Songs for loving
Songs for surrendering liberation
Songs for ancestors
Songs for better days for reconnection to yourself songs for power

So begins the Yemas, the new album by Portland, Oregon soundscape artist Indira Valey. These opening lines feel like a mission statement, Valey outlining what is to come across the next seven tracks. Label Antiquated Future Records describe the album as “a series of seven short rituals offering brief peeks into alternate dimensions, past lives, and dream worlds.” It’s a fitting description of this fusion of ethereal melodies, poetic writing and a whole range of textures and tones, layered over one another in translucent layers like ghostly strata of bygone times.

From the softly turbulent ‘Haci Te Vas’, to the slinky almost Lynchian ‘Paso’, which creeps along like moonlight on the desert floor, Yemas is continually shifting, never settling into an easily-defined shape. The devotional quality I mentioned at the beginning is perhaps most apparent on ‘Straight Arrows’, initial choral vocals summoning Valey’s voice proper. “I am a blister turning to callus,” she sings with constrained fervour, “watch as my language reverses the spell.”

‘Vessel’ sounds haunted, ethereal layered vocals dopplering in and out of earshot over sparsely atmospheric guitar. Like much of what Indira Valey does, the song is full of dream-like juxtaposition, particularly in the clash between gauzy beauty and violent imagery, talk of a burning body, of a broken breastbone, of screams. Finale ‘Hold’ is an exercise in wordless atmosphere, Valey’s percussion clinking and clanging, her gentle wailing barely audible in the background. More than any other song on Yemas it sounds like an invocation, the drums opening up a portal to some other realm, a place we only see in glimpses, snatches of a faraway voice slipping through.

Yemas is out now and you can get it from the Antiquated Future Records Bandcamp page.

The post Indira Valey – Yemas appeared first on Various Small Flames.