Sophie Zelmani

As the first snowflakes of the year fell on the Swedish midlands, Sophie Zelmani put the final touches on her new album, entitled, "Love Affair". It is a collection of songs where intensity and silence are intertwined; an album that sparkles like those intense days of red and yellow autumn when the first, fine layers of snow add whiteness and purity to the glow of autumnal colours. More than eight years have passed since Sophie Zelmani's eponymous debut. Back in the mid-nineties her music was a fresh spring breeze, her sound unpolished and her songs mellow summer ballads of seldom-heard directness and honesty. After another three critically acclaimed albums, Sophie Zelmani is back with the magical voice and the gift of expressing a lot with few words. As its title suggests, "Love Affair" is an album about people and their relations. The songs evoke intimacy and demand attention and proximity. Listen to songs like Hard To Know and Grand as Loving - in which Sophie's voice disappears into a mere whisper "Love Affair" is a softly spoken album on which the song title Fade is symptomatic to the overall aesthetics and soundscapes. The music of "Love Affair" is (thanks to its emptiness) of amplified intensity, at times so powerful it is painful. "Love Affair" is a love story in the colours of dusk. The beautiful cover photographs were taken by Anton Corbijn, the royal photographer of pop who has given aesthetic signatures to bands like U2 and Depeche Mode. He also took the pictures for Sophie's second album, "Precious Burden". "Both times it was me who instigated the shoot, not Sophie", says Corbijn. "She is reluctant to let herself be photographed but it is a reluctance born out of purity, not arrogance. Once you get past this, warmth and beauty awaits you, and your camera. I feel that this applies to a certain extent to her music as well." Anton Corbijn came alone bringing only minimal equipment to the small countryside village where Sophie Zelmani lives. No artificial lightning, not even styling or especially selected clothes caught onto his film. Only the everyday of the countryside, the low Swedish autumn sun, the vast farmlands and the appearance of Sophie Zelmani. It is here, in the small village surrounded by vast fields, that Sophie Zelmani has written the majority of the songs on "Love Affair". Some of them were written in Gotland. But she explains that for this album the vital inspiration came from the people she met rather than the places she went to. Maja's Song, is only one example. "I'm not here to make myself heard", sings Sophie Zelmani. A line filled with paradox, but also a highly telling one: "Love Affair" is a rarity, a contemporary album that allows emptiness its place and space. Thirteen songs in the tiny gap between harmony and silence.