Elsa Hewitt – Dominant Heartstrings (2025)

This album arose from playful improvisations, timeless epiphanies, and a period of rest and recovery.

I did a live tour of completely improvised ambient sets in October 2021, after not doing any live shows for over a year, just making mixes and jams for my monthly radio show and other online stuff. The vulnerability of making music up on the spot in front of paying audiences, mainly using guitar, voice and field recordings, was intense, but deeply developmental both creatively and personally.
There’s a more detailed account of this here: t.ly/HAtAj

The collective spirit felt dampened and moody... I went into it keen to let the energy of the audience feed into the resulting creations in some magical joyful way but i didn’t foresee how heavy and challenging it would be.

I travelled solo and laden with instruments on train journeys up and down England, listening to the Real Life Ghost Stories podcast throughout most of it. It was beautifully melancholic, fragile and atmospheric.

At the time I was also broken-hearted over a cat, as well as dealing with trauma-related issues that had been coming up to be worked through for months and months. I was exhausted from being triggered every day in my house share situation, even though I was grateful that it had forced me get to the bottom of some issues and develop the skills and practices for dealing with this stuff. After the tour i retreated to my room and ended up producing the majority of the jams that would form Dominant Heartstrings.

Shortly after this I moved out of London to live somewhere relatively isolated, and was not able to be productive at all for quite some time, which forced me to purify and restructure my relationship to work and creative self-expression. One of the only things my energy would allow was to chip away at these tunes, letting them unfold and come together at an organic pace, as I gradually worked all my shit out.

It was a self-soothing album to begin with, but continuing to work on it throughout a much deeper healing process seemed to expand this aspect of it, and gave it far more significance than I could have envisioned. Cultivating it little by little was life-giving. I would listen to it in its unfinished form purely for relaxation and enjoyment… I can attest to the fact that this album is perfect for rolling around on the floor...