SARAH PAGÉ

The latest album from Montréal’s exploratory harpist Sarah Pagé is a dynamic journey that drifts the listener through tangled knots and flowing eddies. Comprising nine long-form movements, Voda gathers, grows and throws off tensions, revealing murky depths and phenomenal tenderness. The genesis of the pieces included on Voda date back to 2014 when Pagé was invited to collaborate on a contemporary dance piece by Russian/Ukrainian choreographer Nika Stein. In Voda-Eau-Water, Stein and company explore themes of mortality and vitality as they are typified by humankind’s relationship to water.

Over the course of a year Pagé dissected, experimented, scored and expanded the original pieces that accompanied the performance. Working in collaboration with a trusted circle of players and technicians at her home studio outside Morin-Heights bits of myth and bodies of water were transmuted into sound, creating a standalone album of great breadth and intensity. Following instincts that both harkened back to and pushed beyond the original material, Pagé employed an array of techniques to go deeper into the concepts of the work. Several of the instruments were processed through a large piece of sheet metal that was mic’d and dipped in and out of a basin of water. That intensive process created but one subtle colour amidst the vivid soundworld that is Voda. 

The album is being released through Forward Music as a digital download + limited edition of artist prints from visual artist Elena Miroshnichenko who worked on the original performance piece and provides the album's evocative cover art. The prints include a visual for each movement of the album, along with album credits and interpretive texts.

Lac Du Coeur/ Tsarevna Lebed’ is the final single from Voda, the new world-building album from Montreal’s exploratory harpist Sarah Pagé. Moving through spectral passages of whistling feedback and expansive swaths of violin, Lac ultimately settles into a series of rich, aqueous cycles of cinematic harp. Even in its quietest moments, the track feels teeming with emotion. Perhaps that’s because it’s the final movement of the album’s nine-part suite: the culmination of a journey that explores water as a giver of life, a source of sorrow, an abyss to be feared and a vital element in the human experience through the ages. Rooted in a collaborative dance piece with Russian-Ukranian choreographer Nika Stein, Voda takes inspiration from mythologies, poetry and folklore from that religion, creating a vivid sonic experience with water at its center. 

Premiers Pas Au Marécage is the second single from Voda, the forthcoming concept album from Montréal’s exploratory harpist Sarah Pagé. Part of a larger suite of nine movements, Premiers Pas (which translates as ‘First Steps In The Swamp’) is the album’s most straightforward chapter, an attentive piece that moves gracefully from murmuring ambience into a lush arrangement for koto quintet. Thematically, the song is a meditation on origins. Specifically, humankind’s crawling out of the primordial swamp. Pagé sets the scene by lacing recordings of a chorus of Hungarian frogs with washes of subtle electronics, and uses the koto, a Japanese plucked zither, to plot the emergence and ensuing calibration of a body from within the corporeal soup. So…straightforward? Perhaps not. But Pagé’s music has an incredible ability to enthrall even the casual listener, appealing to the underexplored qualities of the human condition.Add text