Orleans, Ela

Orleans, Ela

(colored) Movies For Ears

Night School

REPRESSED ON NEW CLEAR VINYL!!! Movies For Ears is a retrospective collection of works by Polish-born, Glasgow-based artist Ela Orleans, which navigates almost two decades of songwriting in the heart of the global pop underground. This remastered collection casts an ear over what Orleans might call the “pop sensibility” within her back catalogue. Released previously on a number of small DIY labels, Orleans’ music coincided with the explosion of auto-didactic musicians finding their voice in the age of the blogosphere, artists emboldened by the democratisation of music-making afforded by the internet. From the outset, her childhood studying formal music mixed with cut-up techniques, sampling, sound-art and experimentation to create a distinctive signature cloaked in an innate melancholy and playfulness. Fully remastered by James Plotkin, featuring extensive sleeve-notes and rare photos from Orleans’ archive, Movies For Ears presents an appraisal of the musician’s work, painting a portrait of an artist with an uncanny ability to evoke emotions and ghosts of memories in the listener.  “With Ela’s music I feel emotional, engaged… I can’t help but feel she’s always looking for a sense of belonging and it seems to inform all the music that she makes. Glasgow must have more of that belonging feeling than most cities because she’s spent the most time here, an exotic bird in a rainy city she maybe finds a lttle bit of comfort in. It’s a pleasure to have her here, in this awful time to be living in Britain, her illuminations feel important and...

Orleans, Ela

Movies For Ears

Night School

Movies For Ears is a retrospective collection of works by Polish-born, Glasgow-based artist Ela Orleans, which navigates almost two decades of songwriting in the heart of the global pop underground. This remastered collection casts an ear over what Orleans might call the “pop sensibility” within her back catalogue. Released previously on a number of small DIY labels, Orleans’ music coincided with the explosion of auto-didactic musicians finding their voice in the age of the blogosphere, artists emboldened by the democratisation of music-making afforded by the internet. From the outset, her childhood studying formal music mixed with cut-up techniques, sampling, sound-art and experimentation to create a distinctive signature cloaked in an innate melancholy and playfulness. Fully remastered by James Plotkin, featuring extensive sleeve-notes and rare photos from Orleans’ archive, Movies For Ears presents an appraisal of the musician’s work, painting a portrait of an artist with an uncanny ability to evoke emotions and ghosts of memories in the listener.  “With Ela’s music I feel emotional, engaged… I can’t help but feel she’s always looking for a sense of belonging and it seems to inform all the music that she makes. Glasgow must have more of that belonging feeling than most cities because she’s spent the most time here, an exotic bird in a rainy city she maybe finds a lttle bit of comfort in. It’s a pleasure to have her here, in this awful time to be living in Britain, her illuminations feel important and hopeful. A stubborn light; someone...

Orleans, Ela

Circles Of Upper And Lower Hell

Night School

Circles of Upper and Lower Hell is the grandest, deepest work to date by Polish-born, Glasgow-based sound artist and composer Ela Orleans. From her beginnings inaugurating a lo-fi, homespun style that has since developed fully into a language uniquely her own, from tentative live outings featuring multiple instruments to a now-masterly command of sound, Orleans has become one of the most consistently surprising musicians of the global underground. The seventh album under her own name, this expansive vision, loosely based on Dante’s Inferno but infused with deep personal experience, incorporates sound art, orchestral textures, synth pop and electronic music to construct a world equally peppered with loss and inspiration. It pulls all the strands of Orleans’ previous work together into an epic depiction of turmoil wide in scope but reveling in detail. The album documents a far more personal approach to conventional songwriting. Previously, the artist’s sonic textures have relied on samples cleaved out of context, buried songs beneath warped aural gauze, but Circles blows every element of Orleans’s art upwards and further apart. It begins with a masterful, sparse composition, “The Gate,” before melting into “You Go Through Me” (featuring Stephen McRobbie and Katrina Mitchell from The Pastels), one of its most direct, aching pop moments. “Ghost and Whispers” is a hit from another universe, a sparkling propulsion light of touch and almost unbearably, ghostly human.  Circles of Upper and Lower Hell is an honest portrayal of a descent—be it personal or metaphorical—and there are times, like on...