With her new album Aspirin Sun due out April 7 via Bella Union, and having previously shared a video for lead track “King Blixa”, today Emma Tricca shares a visually stunning video for new single “Christodora House”. The song is a homage to her late father, inspired by a historic settlement building in New York’s East Village that is inextricably interlinked with her paternal lineage. Tricca’s great uncle, an artist in New York, had painted the 16-story building in the 1930s. When she stood outside its perpendicular lines in the summer of 2019, she was struck by this unusual orbit so many years later, standing in the same spot as her predecessor, coming to the profound realization that she had come full circle.
The song comes accompanied by an extraordinary short film made by Francesco Cabras. Commenting on the track and video Cabras says: “When Emma and I discussed the song, its meaning and inspiration, I started to ‘see’ the building – Christodora House – as a portal into the unknown. I had footage I had filmed in three different continents that seemed to perfectly depict what Emma had felt and translated into song. Ancient, primitive buildings, a woman wandering in search of freedom from grief and finding peace. Influences of Bunuel, Parajanov, Jodorowsky, even Mario Bava and Jesús Franco, are very much present but ultimately, in assembling the sequence, I was pulled into the vortex of the crazy sounds, her voice and melody.”
| It felt like I was driving through tunnels,” Emma Tricca says of her fourth album – her first for Bella Union. A phosphorescent panorama of undulating colour, shape and sound. As with any transformation, it is this sense of movement that underpins Aspirin Sun and its bold new form, ebbing and flowing, continually unfurling. The tunnels led the Italian-born, London-based singer-songwriter towards something expansive and far-reaching: an entirely new and experimental collection of songs. But they also drew her closer to her late father, and her memories of him driving them both in his small white Fiat, darting through the Alps and whizzing through darkened passageways, where shafts of light flickered ahead of them in the distance. Light and shade; past and future; love and loss. “I was in uncharted territory trying to understand what was happening to me,” Tricca says. In the winter of 2018, only months after her mystical third album St. Peter was released, her father died, submerging her in a subaqueous world of grief. “I think that the loss really informed the tunes a lot,” she muses. And the tunes quickly emerged. Tricca decided to spend a few months in New York during the summer of 2019 – and started recording Aspirin Sun in her long-time collaborator Steve Shelley’s studio. Ask Tricca how Aspirin Sun feels to her and she’ll describe it as “a weird germination” of disparate influences. A “Wim-Wenders-meets-Fellini-8 ½” kind of set-up – especially ‘Autumn’s Fiery Tongue’ which swells and amplifies into a pulsating, hallucinatory odyssey that came to her in a dream. “You know when the sun is in the sky and it’s so round it looks like an aspirin? This record very much depicts that kind of sky,” Tricca says. It also depicts the discombobulating nature of grief – as overexposed as a blazing ball of gas and light. “I was blindly finding my way through my grief with music and dreams that I wrote down in the morning.” This new psychedelic horizon could only be fully brought to life by a band she calls her family. The same musicians she collaborated with on her 2018 outing, St. Peter: Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley and Dream Syndicate guitarist Jason Victor, who both also co-produced the album, and bass player Pete Galub. All three musicians brought something unique to the record. “Pete comes from more of a traditional songwriting background, Steve and Jason are more experimental, and then there’s me, very much in-between. For me, that was magic,” she says. As an only child, Tricca has always been used to solitude. But when the world shut down, her windows flung open. “On the one hand, I’m a loner; on the other, I get so much excitement when I work with other people. If you grew up in a broken family, like I did, when it comes to work and friendship I’m always looking for the family I never had. That’s why, with these guys, I feel complete.” Album artwork and tracklist below: |
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| 1. Devotion 2. Christodora House 3. Autumn’s Fiery Tongue 4. Leaves 5. King Blixa 6. Rubens’ House 7. Through The Poet’s Eyes 8. Space and Time |