Lykke Li
After two years in the making, Lykke Li releases EYEYE, an immersive audiovisual album on [PIAS] Recordings.
Reuniting with her longtime collaborator Björn Yttling after eight years, Lykke aimed to sonically create something intimate and pared back, with a grand, cinematic visual to accompany it. The acclaimed musician gave the world a glimpse of the project with the releases of NO HOTEL and HIGHWAY TO YOUR HEART earlier this spring, and in the last few weeks leading up to the album’s release, has teased the visual components.
The result is an 8-track, 33-minute dreamlike and atmospheric soundscape. It's a stripped-down production that is void of the use of clicktracks, headphones, and digital instruments. The vocals were recorded on a handheld $70 drum mic, often in the moment of composition, lending a raw and vulnerable quality to Lykke's vocals. The record was mixed to tape by Shawn Everett over several months in Los Angeles. “I wanted the record to have the intimacy of listening to a voice memo on a macro dose of LSD,” Lykke says. The album is accompanied by seven visual loops: together, the music and visuals reveal a grander narrative. Directed by Theo Lindquist and shot on 16-millimeter film by cinematographer Edu Grau (A Single Man, Passing). The one-minute videos, filmed last spring in Los Angeles, are meant to be viewed as fragments of a larger story. (The male star is Jeff Wilbusch, from Oslo and Unorthodox.) The videos evoke the album’s core themes of fantasy, repetition, and the infinite loops we’re stuck in.
