Fiona Fiasco

With “Blue Rider, Blue Faced,” Fiona Fiasco creates small sonic assemblages—images of a world that seems familiar yet always eludes us slightly. A buzzing, ghostly quality emerges in the mood, the instrumentation, and the content alike.

It feels as though one is in several rooms at once. This band is playing in the lobby of an old hotel; the scene fades, and suddenly you find yourself on a country road surrounded by meadows and woods. Everything is beautiful, yet also somewhat strange. Time and again, something new is discovered, something that comes to the fore—or was it always there?

And it is within this energy that the music was created: words and themes are gathered and organized before a story even takes shape. In this way, the sounds grow and spring forth, allowing images and content to emerge organically. The sounds do not simply abstract themselves into a piece of music, but rather
retain the vitality of the process.

The EP was recorded over the course of the past year and a half at various locations and produced by Fiasco himself with Simon Boss and Lukas Kuprecht. Just as in the pieces themselves, fragment after fragment came together: one track was recorded directly onto tape in an empty Zurich off-space. Other songs took shape in a secluded house in Ticino and were finalized in a triangle of Zurich’s suburbs.

And so, when listening to the EP, one often finds oneself in a beautifully bewildered state, as the music offers a bouquet of suggestions from which one can pick out images and associations. Although it repeatedly emphasizes beauty and peace, there are also moments when something eerie or a quiet sadness seeps through.