about the record

Summer was conceived as an entry point for Sonae to access and wrestle with difficult themes, engaging with them authentically, artfully, and personally. It was also the starting point for a collaborative audio-visual project with video artist Jennifer Trees.

Summer articulates these ideas using the unique musical and sonic language that Sonae has been developing across previous releases. It is haunted by blistered cellos and spectral string drones, the elegant and emotive movement around diatonic harmonies that echo the classicism and bucolic themes of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. Like Vivaldi, Sonae's work is programmatic, presenting a progressive, intensifying narrative and suggesting aural phenomena of the natural world—buzzing insects, breaking rocks, waves crashing, dust and heat rising—and characterizing the seasonal spirit as capricious, volatile, and punishing.

In these ways, Summer is related to pastoral traditions of European classicism, evoking the aura of doomed and dust-blown gothic grandiosity. It also has feet firmly planted within the lean, sound worlds of underground techno—pulsating four-on-the-floor beats with deep, vibrational sine-wave sub kicks; elegantly bleak, distorted atmospherics that straddle the uncanny space between corrosion and euphoria. The result is a visceral and poetic listening experience: original, highly affecting, fully engaging body, mind, and soul.