Clarissa Connelly - Holler

Clarissa Connelly - "Holler" from the 2020 self-released album The Voyager.

This week's Song of the Day were selected by KEXP DJ Kevin Cole, host of Drive Time, in honor of International Women's Month. Re-listen to our kick-off day of programming, and explore articles and live sessions from some of our favorite female artists here.

Combining the technology of her Korg M1 synthesizer with inspiration from ancient lands, Copenhagen-based artist Clarissa Connelly crafts beautiful baroque pop songs, highlighting her diaphanous melodies with lyrics that sow the seeds of Celtic folklore. In fact, the album was released simultaneously with an app named Vandringen that spotlights these foregone Danish locations, not viewable on Google Maps.

"Many of the places are forgotten to some extent, at least when I was there back in 2018," Connelly told The Wire last year. "Since the pandemic, people’s interests have turned back to what’s around them in a really beautiful way. But I’ve always been interested in how the landscape was formed, either by humans or by the ice age pushing the soil back and forth creating mountains, or ice holes that become a lake two ice ages later. Imagining that timespan gives me a huge feeling of wanting to create. I’m fascinated by old buildings in cities – like a church, looking at the stones and wondering who built it – but they’re only maybe a thousand years old. Looking at these more ancient sites, the burial mounds and Viking fortresses, that’s even further back into history. I just get awestruck and want to sing or write about it."

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