Release Date: 25th March 2013 Album Stream and Interview on Dazed Digital Snowblind (The-Drum Remix) on The Line Of Best Fit Snowblind (original version) on Under The Radar Magazine Snowblind (Ukulele) on the 405 ‘Imaginature’ is the striking third album from HK119, aka Heidi Kilpeläinen, due for release on 25th March 2013 on One Little Indian Records. Produced (with the exception of one track) by Christoffer Berg (The Knife/Fever Ray/Little Dragon/Depeche Mode) Inspired by the world of animals, plants, land and sea, an organic synth-world far removed from the hyper-stylised future pop of Heidi’s previous work. The root of this new flowering of HK119 was beautifully simple; on holiday in her native Finland, Heidi was stopped in her tracks by some birdsong. “I don't think I ever listened to a bird before that,” she marvels. “It was really quite bizarre. And I suddenly realised, I've never listened to a bird. You know, there's a difference between hearing and listening.” As a whole, ‘Imaginature’s combination of dark, distorted vocals, hypnotic rhythms and spacious, layered production are reminiscent of a spirit journey, a lucid dreamstate where anything is possible. It evokes a sense of intense natural epiphany; ‘Wild Grass’ recalls Dead Can Dance as much as Fever Ray with its melding of that birdsong with pipe-like synth sounds and softly padding, circling beats. ‘Iceberg’ (produced by Mark Dog Sayfritz and forthcoming single) as clear and crisp as its namesake, imagines a lover as a sparkling, cool surface with great hidden depths, while the likes of ‘Hide’ and ‘Snowblind’ recalls Eurythmics in their sense of precision and space but also their rushingly romantic choruses. Another inspiration came in a more literary guise, from the roots of Finnish culture - the Kalevala. The Finns’ great national poem, a romantic 19th-century patchwork of ancient folk tales, was compiled by scholar Elias Lönnrot, who roamed the country on field trips, writing down the ancient poems and stories of his country’s oral tradition. It largely concerns the adventures of Väinamöinen, a shape-shifting shamanic figure with a magical voice of great power; he can sing the world around him into new shapes, enchanting, creating and destroying. Some parallels, both in imagery and fact, were about to be conjured up in Heidi’s own life. A few years later she was on a nature trip in Brazil and met a shaman whom she spent some time with – and who features on ‘Adailson’, after whom the song is named. He inspired Heidi to explore the world of nature – as a spiritual as well as a romantic idea - as a basis for her new album. Heidi gathered materials through field recordings - the sounds of waves in the sea, of footsteps in snow, of buzzing insects, manipulating them on her computer and weaving them around songs written on a piano in her living room. The end result is this stunning album.
