Daphne X - An Echo Of Something I Don't Remember (2024)

The music of Daphne X is often rooted in the voice, but on her striking new album, An Echo of Something I Don’t Remember, the Barcelona-based, Greek Anatolian artist and sound designer stretches that idea well beyond her own utterances and vocalizations. While her wordless murmurs do seem to angelically hover throughout the record, they’re merely one string in a delicate aural web, one that includes not only others’ voices, but a litany of sounds both organic and synthesized. The gentle clacking of her laptop’s keyboard, the familiar groan of a rusty window handle, loops plucked from tapes she listened to as a child—these are just a few of the elements one might hear in Daphne’s slow-brewing soundpieces, which also draw warmth from field recordings she captured in an Austrian garden and the gauzy drones of an old Magnus Electric Chord Organ she found at a Polish flea market.

Deeply inspired by the meditative works and deep listening ethos of Pauline Oliveros, Daphne is most interested in fostering connection, filling her reverb-glazed compositions with feelings of wonder and anticipation as she builds a sense of sonic kinship with the world around her. Perhaps that’s why An Echo of Something I Don’t Remember, even during its most ethereal moments, feels so distinctly tactile. Daphne X may imbue her work with a certain sense of weightlessness, but rather than drifting off into some fantastical realm, she quietly draws attention to the beauty, majesty and melancholy of her immediate surroundings.