FIONA FIASCO - BLUE RIDER, BLUE FACED [EP] - [SELF-RELEASED]

With “Blue Rider, Blue Faced” Fiona Fiasco creates sonic assemblages, glimpses of a world that feels familiar and yet always slips just slightly out of reach. A shimmering sense of ghostliness runs through the atmosphere, the instrumentation, and the lyrics alike.

The debut Single ‘Stacy’, for example, unfolds like a playful conversation with a friendly apparition, intimate in its closeness to the otherworldly. Carried by spare, delicate vocal lines, a whole array of curious sounds begins to stir. Flickering guitar chords and whispering synths drift by, surface, and dissolve again. They almost seem to wave at you, like gentle spirits passing through. They invite you in for tea, or to hover alongside them for a brief moment.

The title track, ‘Blue Rider, Blue Faced’ recalls blue days, but carries them within a hopeful momentum. Riding alongside this ominous, mysterious rider. The video for ‘Blue Rider, Blue Faced’ was filmed by Australian painter Georgia Spain in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. It feels like a visual echo of this floating, slightly displaced world. In its colour and composition drawing inspiration from Gabriele Münter’s paintings, a member of the early 20th century artist group ‘Blue Rider’.

The music itself emerged from that same energy. Throughout the process, thoughts, words, and sounds were collected in an expressionistic way. Words were assembled and arranged before there was any clear story. Sounds sprouted and skipped into being, allowing images and meanings to grow with an organic liveliness. Every element on this EP remains distinctly itself. Each sound holds its own role, and only within that role can the figures truly come to life. Words form sentences, yet they remain meaningful in their singularity and in their sheer sound. The music does not smooth itself into abstraction. It preserves the vitality of its making and carries that process within it.

The care in the compositions is also reflected in their endings. Just as everything appears, skips forward, drifts past, and disappears again, there is always a precise moment when a piece finds its natural close and must be released. And yet the tracks continue to simmer in the listener’s ears.

In ‘Big Band,’ for instance, it feels as though you are inhabiting several rooms at once, with new details catching your attention again and again. This big band plays in the lobby of an old hotel. Then the scene fades, and suddenly is on a country road bordered by meadow and forest. The setting shifts back and forth. Everything is beautiful and slightly strange at the same time. Images and moods fade in and out with the sounds, curling around the core melodies. Something new keeps emerging, or perhaps it has been there all along.

‘Wasteland’ begins like an Americana tinged folk desert, yet it too is threaded with whirring details and unexpected detours. Brief sonic bridges step away from the scene, only to reflect Fiona Fiasco’s distinct signature even more clearly. The songs are richly adorned yet transparent, especially the more stripped back folk pieces such as ‘Garden’ and ‘Gentle Sun’.

The EP was recorded over the past year and a half in various locations and produced by Fiasco herself, together with Simon Boss and Lukas Kuprecht. As within the songs themselves, fragments joined with fragments. One track recorded entirely on tape in a Zurich Art Space. The others came together in a secluded house in Ticino and finished in a triangle of Zurich’s Suburbs.

The result flickers and shimmers eclectically, yet remains cohesive without drawing a single obvious thread through everything. Listening to the EP, you often find yourself in a gently bewildered state. The music offers a bouquet of possibilities from which you can choose your own images and associations. While it frequently highlights moments of beauty and calm, there are also flashes of unease or quiet melancholy.