Sophia Hansen-Knarhoi (UK)

Sophia performs live at Rosemount Hotel on Friday February 20, joined by supports Ben Buchanan and more special guests to be announced. This rare, intimate seated performance offers a close-up experience of her music and is not to be missed.
 

Sophia Hansen-Knarhoi is a detail focused experimental ambient-folk songwriter, combining expansive evocative sound worlds with intimate storytelling. 

With her first album Undertow, London-based composer/singer-songwriter Sophia Hansen-Knarhoi reveals stark vulnerability nestled in a dark ambience that is both intimate and expansive. Voice and cello provide the bedrock of a detail focused record, that threads together memory, grief, growth and connection. Undertow took its shape during an acclimation of sensuality and self, through a period of processing trauma, and all of life, love and loss that it surrounds and intertwines with. ‘Undertow’ binds this intimacy with the corporeal, spanning violation and deep trust. It deals with the fallout of the victims of violence against women, voyaging through fear and pain to absolution.

“The cello is widely considered the closest instrument to the voice. This is something that continually bleeds into my practice, finding the connection between voice, cello and body. The physicalization of this combined practice creates a sense of corporeality in my sound. I let it be intuitive, my playing and singing guided by my breath and the way my body moves. I found the duality of this expression informed reflections of sensuality and intimacy throughout the album.”

Undertow coalesces in a unique combination of clarity in its folk/singer-songwriter storytelling with a wholly alive and reactive bed of instrumentation. Instead of traditional structures and overly virtuosic solos, all aspects of production and performance lean heavily into spontaneity and gut feeling, reaching closer to a sense of unfiltered emotional truth. The result is an act of reification: songs with a sense of touch, of ears and eyes and flesh, coming to life around the mouth.

With the skilled Brooklyn producer Randall Dunn as a collaborator, Undertow pushes further into the abstract, a dark and dissociative space. Dunn carves intricate space with vast void-like atmospheres and cinematic intensity, with an unrelenting foregrounding of vulnerability. With instrumentalists Peter Zummo, Marilu Donovan, Henry Fraser, Luke Bergman and Brent Arnold, the arrangements on Undertow draw breath into a minimalistic sonic landscape, occupying a cohesive improvisational latitude. 

Born in Perth, Hansen-Knarhoi grew up surrounded by the natural world. ‘Undertow’ draws on the stark landscapes and vast waters of Western Australia. At moments, field recordings are woven into the work, while at others, arrangements reflect its beautiful barren environment through memory. “Engulfing myself in nature has always been a way for me to process the world, to bring me back into my body and my senses”. ‘Undertow’ revels in this remote sonic landscape, submerging stories in the depths of truth.