Interlude #1 :: Karen Vogt

Four quite open and complex questions are the starting point for the creation of a rather personal guest mix that blends sound, imagination and memory. This new series is curated by sound artist and music producer Maria Papadomanolaki also known as Dalot for Igloo Magazine. Interlude focuses on female artists and aspires to highlight how exceptional, skillfully crafted and varied the responses can be. Interlude #1 :: Karen Vogt

Comfort sounds like being wrapped in a world-within-a-world

Four quite open and complex questions are the starting point for the creation of a rather personal guest mix that blends sound, imagination and memory. This new series is curated by sound artist and music producer Maria Papadomanolaki also known as Dalot for Igloo Magazine. Interlude focuses on female artists and aspires to highlight how exceptional, skillfully crafted and varied the responses can be.

The first episode of the series invites Paris-based, Australian artist, vocalist, and musician Karen Vogt. Vogt’s personal space of expression through sound can be haunting, atmospheric, poetic and cinematic. Member of Australian dream pop band Heligoland and frequent collaborator of Pepo Galán, Markus Guentner and more recently Jolanda Moletta (on Suspended Between Worlds), Vogt’s vocals and releases create an intimate trajectory and a colorful and delicate palimpsest of dreams and memories.

Her recent album titled Haunted Woodland Volume Five, released on May 1st via the Wayside & Woodland Recordings, is a magical collection of nature inspired compositions. In Vogt’s own words “I pass a cluster of six trees on my walks along the Marne River. These six trees stood out due to their neat arrangement…They became the focal point and inspiration as I gathered my improvised material for this six-track album.” Expansive, elegiac and deeply personal, the six pieces offer a very engaging journey through Vogt’s reflective space. In the opening piece “Love Comes,” Scottish musician Hamish Mackintosh (aka FUEL / The Wave Room) appears with guest vocals, reciting some of his own lyrics. He reappears on the softly recited “Air On My Skin.” The album concludes with three remixes by Epic45, E.L Heath and The Space Between Numbers.

Vogt’s guest mix for the series captures some of the magic of her musical space made of breaths, whispers and deep reverberant pauses.​

 

Some words by the artist for the mix ::

While making a new album, Haunted Woodland Volume Five for UK label Wayside & Woodland Recordings, I had many fragmented vocals — old, new, and unfinished. When an album is built largely around improvisation, you can’t use every recording. There’s a strange, bittersweet feeling when you realize you have to cull much of it. When it’s vocals, it feels even more personal. But it’s the experiments along the way that allowed you to reach the endpoint of the album. Those twists and turns now sit on your computer, and every musician has tonnes of these lying around.

For this mix, I included the experiments and the parts that were left behind, or exchanged for what felt like more interesting material. I included them alongside the final album tracks. These twists and turns still hold meaning for me — layered vocals and drones that felt right, and human, in their imperfections. Spontaneous vocals that, in the true spirit of the album, haunted me too. Especially the lyric about money. Those early sparks of inspiration are precious to me, and it’s nice to have this mix to include them. Thanks to Maria for inviting me to put this mix together for you. Enjoy the detours.

The mix is made in response to the following four questions for which Karen also provided some written reflections:

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Maria / Igloo :: What is the first sound that you listen to when you remember the past?

Karen Vogt :: Many sounds come rushing in — fuzzy FM radios tuning in and out, the mechanical click of a tape deck, the whir of a CD spinning to life. I hear Walkman tapes flipping sides, flywire doors creaking and slamming in the summer heat, car doors thudding shut. There’s a whole mechanical symphony: staplers snapping, cameras clicking, pens scratching on paper. I remember scratching words into a tree trunk, the morning songs of magpies, the hiss of bus doors, tennis balls bouncing across suburban courts, the clatter of dishes in the sink, the steady hum of a blow-dryer, a dog barking next door, the muffled bass of a neighbor’s party bleeding into the night. The past is alive with sounds. Meaningful sounds that trigger a memory, or a feeling.

Igloo :: What is a sound that you are afraid you will forget if you stop or cannot hear anymore?

Karen :: I think the real fear isn’t forgetting a sound — it’s that over time, memories shape-shift. You stop hearing the original and start remembering a version of it, something half-imagined. Technology is so good now at recreating things that it’s easy to lose track of what was real and what is a copy. But I think it’s probably the small, everyday satisfying sounds of food I would miss most: the crackle of a sweet pastry breaking apart, the soft crunch of a baguette, the slow sizzle of an open grilled cheese sandwich, and my favorite — the snap of chocolate breaking off a block. I don’t want to forget those sounds.

“The future asks us to stay curious and be anchored, but not so much that we are stuck. Somehow ready for the end and for the beginning. So we should listen to it with all our being.” ~Karen Vogt

Igloo :: Is there a listening environment that you go to when you seek comfort?

Karen :: For me, comfort sounds like being wrapped in a world-within-a-world — somewhere sealed off, where outside noise barely filters in. It’s that feeling of being under a heavy blanket, or where the sounds of life are softened. You feel protected from the outside world. A small, private space where everything slows down, and the outside world can’t quite reach you. Sometimes it’s just a cosy corner of a big place, or a spot tucked away in a park that feels separate from everything else. That instantly gives me comfort because the world is so noisy and often invades your private space through social media, emails and messages. But really, it’s necessary to just shut it out for a while and turn it off. You need to seek that comfort out more often these days.

Igloo :: What is the sound of the future and how should we listen to it?

Karen :: The future feels like it’s arriving faster than we can process — wild, messy, and still unwritten.  It’s hard to know if we’re building a new world or deconstructing the old one, but the future of sound is about tuning into bigger questions: What are we leaving behind? Will it still matter, or will it just disappear?

Listening will become something even deeper — a way of traveling through time, across cultures, even into the microscopic and cosmic. Sound will be the bridge — carrying us off-world, underground, into other minds and possibilities. The future asks us to stay curious and be anchored, but not so much that we are stuck. Somehow ready for the end and for the beginning. So we should listen to it with all our being.

Photo by: Jolanda Moletta

Haunted Woodland Volume Five is available on Wayside & Woodland. [Bandcamp]