Carmen Villain’s new album Memoria, released on 4 September 2026, uses an unusually broad palette: clarinet, piano, synthesizers, field recordings, percussion, flute, trumpet and strings.
Yet the most useful clue may be the title.
Villain describes her work as moving through memory and transformation, with sounds eroding, repeating and returning in altered forms. On Memoria, instruments rarely feel isolated into clean roles. Acoustic and electronic materials occupy the same atmosphere until identifying the original source becomes less important than hearing what has happened to it.
That feels close to how memory actually behaves.
We do not retrieve an event like opening an untouched audio file.
Every recollection has already passed through time.
Details disappear.
Others become exaggerated.
Something from the present enters the past without permission.
Production can work the same way.
Repeat a sound.
Filter it.
Record the processed version.
Return to it later.
Eventually the copy may carry more emotional weight than the original.
The studio becomes less like an archive preserving sounds accurately and more like memory itself, constantly rewriting what it stores.
