Words by Justin Turford
One inescapable reason for music making is to explore and release the ambiguous, sometimes confused feelings and thoughts that can pervade our inner lives. Although I can not opine that this is why Swiss artist Leoni Leoni creates, it certainly sounds like we are delving into her most private memories and moods on this release, a compilation of smudged electronic pop culled from four different homemade cassette releases that she recorded and released between 2019 and 2021.
“I think it's interesting to hear songs from all 4 cassettes on one album,” explains Leoni, “You hear the sound developing from a phase where I recorded everything through a super noisy leslie speaker and I didn’t care if the washing machine was running during the recordings (yes, my studio is also the laundry room of my house) to a phase of insomnia where I only recorded at night [Easy Sleep - 2020], to the tidy and a bit square recordings of Drum Problems [2021] and back to the minimalist synth songs of Yellow and Why {2021] which i recorded next to smoking weed and watching cartoons in a very sad month of February.”
A serious player in the Swiss underground, Leoni nearly gave up on music a few years ago but rediscovered her mojo in the confines of her home (specifically the laundry room that is also her studio), fashioning dreamy, spaced out ‘ballads’ of narcotic beauty. I’m not suggesting her recording schedule involves hoovering up the local chemist but there’s a codeine haze filter that burnishes these fourteen songs, only adding to their strange, hypnotic allure. Everything feels pitched down, the drum machines, the wobbling tape machines, the perfectly subtle synthesisers. Even the emotional punch of her delicate whisper of a voice is muted but then maybe, I need a quieter space to truly inhabit this collection of private enigmas, these translucent bedroom vignettes from the corners of Leoni’s musical mind.
Music full of muted spells, this beautifully odd release deserves your attention. 8.5/10