ekin fil - sleepwalkers (2024)

the drone-pop consternations of ekin fil emerge through vaporous tone and forlorn, distant song, as if plucked from a dream. these exist on their own accord, moving with their own internal logic of an emotion heaviness that belies any the passing observation of this as mere shoegazing ambience. her songs, her compositions find themselves adjacent the fragmented etherealization of elisabeth fraser's voice from a forgotten scene of a particular david lynch film, as a asmr trigger for proustian recollection. something profound. something hidden. something desolately sad.

the helen scarsdale agency has had the pleasure of witnessing ekin's continued development, maturation, and growth as a composer, having released now seven of her magnificent, under-the-radar gems. her slow burning, dejected ballads continue to draw from the deep well of sorrow, with varying frequencies and intensities of bitter light poking through. loves lost. a world broken. all is not hopeless, but there is a considerable amount of shit to wade through.

sleepwalkers embraces a familiar set of metaphors in her work, that of narcolepsy and the unsettled state of existence between sleep and being awake. but she stretches herself with a set of compositions that run parallel to the work of tim hecker as in the gravitation soft-noise of "stone cold" or to a slow motion serialism that punctuates the ambient crawl of her ambitious "gone gone." recommended for fans of grouper, rafael anton irisarri, a.c. marias, and carla dal forno.