Although still armed with her core sonic tryptch—piano, cello, and vocals—a combination perhaps more associated with orchestral music, Bianca Nisha is nothing if not adventurous, and her latest album takes her quest to find the musical limits of what the astute composer can do with those sounds even further on this, her second album.
It turns out that even those recognisable sounds can go places that you wouldn’t expect, here being used to build soundscapes that are more in keeping with the likes of Kate Bush or Natasha Khan than the more traditional realms we usually find them plying their sonic trade.
Just take a song like “Heavy,” for example, a dark and beguiling slice of alt-rock, a growling guitar line (or perhaps a cello doing dark and intense things) slowly cocooned in more sweeping, gossamer sounds and something that you might expect from the likes of P J Harvey, rather than someone with the background of Bianca Nisha. But that is the whole point.
“Eavesdropping” feels like a duet between vocals and cello, the two voices intertwining or creatively opposing, a call and response, opposites that attract, a delicate duet as they both dance gracefully through the sonic landscape. And “Cheater” again shows that you don’t need big guitars and overdriven amps to create lush and anthemic sounds, here atmosphere and anticipation rising up into the anthemic and often intense.
Bianca Nisha reminds us that the power of any music is not in the genre you pursue or the instruments that you call upon, but in the creativity and purpose to which you put them to work. And in using, perhaps unexpected instruments to make, often the most graceful yet gritty, eloquent yet unexpected sounds, she hopefully gives other musicians pause for thought about how they might approach their own musical tasks.
Take the listener down the path less travelled, and you will expose them to the most amazing sonic views!
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