Nina Kinert - CHORALS (2024) [Hi-Res]

Nina Kinert released RELIGIOUS in September 2023. An album telling personal stories about growing up within the Pentecostal Church Community in Sweden. It also explores the attraction to spiritual mystique and the supernatural.

CHORALS is a continuation of RELIGIOUS. An experiment revolving around voice and death, recorded from November 23 - February 24 in close collaboration with Anton Sundell and Daniel Fagge Fagerström. Both theme and instrumentation derives directly from church halls and rooms for worship with organs, harps and flutes alongside arpeggios and sequencing synthesizers. Voices are central to the sound, Ninas of course, but also the communal and chanting voice of a church assembly, aerial angel choirs, opera and a fat lady that sings in the end. The digitalised and mechanic computerised voice is symbolically a multifaceted tool to work with when it comes to themes revolving around soul and spiritual presence - something that Nina and her co-producers experimented with in the studio using both their own voices, but also the Ninotron - a synthesizer based on Ninas voice that Fagerström built back in 2015 for the Nina K On Ice album.

The opening track ’Final Girl Circuit’ is a roughly 15 minute long ode to the final surviving character in slasher films and the labyrinth run we’re all put on earth for. Musically it’s a rythmic play with repetition and variation, ending in a spherical landscape, floating free of pulse and expectations. The choir chants in latin: nothing perishes, there is no breath, no spirit, in reality, in the sacred.

’Satan Sun, Mother Moon’ was written in the aftermath of the death of a loved one. It deals with both the feeling of loss and grief but also the feeling of loving someone anew. A feeling that only death and clear endings can invoke. The song is inspired by the great solacing words from heroine Laurie Anderson; the purpose of death is the release of love.

Every song has a story of it’s own to tell, but to tell each and everyone in detail would fight the purpose of this album. CHORALS is a collection of work about how voices can meet, past and present, the ones inside and around.