Astrid Sonne: A Newfound Voice

​​Astrid Sonne music finds itself categorized in a lot of different places. Sometimes it’s described as “experimental” “IDM” or even “classical” – however what’s most consistent about it is how little she pays attention to those boundaries. “To be honest, I don't feel like there's a category that I don't like to be put in as long as I express the things that I feel like expressing. I’ve just always been into such a broad variety of things, so I think that reflects in the music as well.”

Much of Sonne’s music has involved harnessing production techniques such as digital sampling or synthesis, and approaching them from her background in classical music, conservatory training and choral singing. This fusion of an experimentalist's approach to technology with a foundation in traditional disciplines has made her music wildly unpredictable and inspiring. She has bounded from solo string compositions to staccato digital chopping sound design pieces, often within the same album, or committed an entire EP to movements within a cycle that encompass both digital and acoustic sounds orchestrated to blur together.

One very recent development has seen Sonne pivot towards songwriting, using her own voice to sing her own lyrics. Her latest album Great Doubt, released in February 2024 leans into deeply personal and expressive songs fused with her inventive sound manipulation. For an artist known to stretch electronics and sampled sounds across genre bounds, pivoting to intimate love songs might seem an unexpected turn. It’s not the first time her music has featured voices, her 2018 album Human Lines featured choral samples, and her 2021 album outside of your lifetime featured her voice hauntingly layered over itself as a choral motet. But on Great Doubt, Sonne taps the live wire of personal expressions – longing, confusion, uncertainty. “Vocals and choir-ish pieces have been present in my work for years, and that's also very much my own background. I used to sing in church choirs when I was young. All my instrumental music for me holds the same personal expression, but obviously, using your voice and lyrics is a more direct form of communication. I think that's why I've been working with instrumental music for so long, because it doesn't tell you anything. It's more like, ‘this is the room, and then you can kind of enter it the way you wanted to.’ With this album, I've just felt a need to try and challenge myself in terms of being a bit more direct, but still having that open space.”

Some lyrical inspiration came from unlikely sources – “Give My All” takes its lyrical cue from Mariah Carey’s “My All.” While that might lead one to think Sonne was paying tribute to a pop idol, the origin is more surprising. “I was doing this score for a short film and they asked me to do a cover or a reinterpretation of that Mariah Carey track.” While not being a terrain she would have normally explored, she embraced being in a new space. “I felt a lot of freedom and I felt like, okay, I can just go nuts now.”

For Sonne, there was freedom in the uncertainty created by this given assignment. Collaborating with a filmmaker fostered a new way of looking at her own music, and this opened a door. “It's almost like having an alias or something where you don't think too much about it, you just do something.” Despite not being a particularly avid listener of pop music, she noticed that in singing there was an opportunity for a new avenue towards an authentic expression in an area she’s never considered. “I've never really listened to that music, but I really enjoyed working with these lyrics and that track opened up a new way of working for me. So it's very important in that sense.”  

While her path through styles and genres may have meandered a bit, music has been a constant for Sonne, who has had training as viola player, vocalist and composer. “I was pursuing a classical career when I was younger, but then I stopped when I was 18 because I felt really restrained.” This reaction against earlier constraints led her to dive into an approach to music-making centered on space and separation rather than strict orchestration. “I've had this tendency of really wanting to separate things – this is the synthesizer, this is the voice, this is the viola. Whereas on this album, the focus for me has been on orchestrating and pushing myself to combine more of those elements.”

While she has shifted away from the strictures of her early training, some elements still make their way into her current work. Her university studies in composition gave her opportunities to record herself playing drums, fragments of which appear on Great Doubt. “We just recorded the drums from different mics, different positions around in the room and in the hallway. At the time, I had no idea what to do with that material. It was more like an experiment. Then later I made a sample bank in Ableton, and then I just slowly started using it. And the last bit of "Boost" comes from a residency I did at EMS in Stockholm. I’ve been there a couple of times. And every time I've been there, it's just been incredible, using their different gear, and the modular synthesizers. It’s the same approach as with the drum samples, just playing around and not trying to do too much while I'm playing it, so I can kind of use it afterwards.”

Sonne’s work often involves piecing together fragments of recorded sounds or instruments, then manipulating and fusing them in Live. “The process of making this album is processing and manipulating back and forth between audio and MIDI and trying to push the material, spread it out and kind of see what I can get out of that cool material.” One example she gives is the album track “Staying Here.” “I was watching this tutorial with, maybe Bruce Springsteen? I can't remember. Or another guitarist. I sampled it and then I recorded it, and then I transformed it, converted it to MIDI. And then I put an arpeggiator on it and formed a rhythmical pattern.”

This practice of pulling at a source material until it can become something unrecognizable and transform into a new piece happens across Sonne’s work. It isn’t limited just to material pulled from outside sources, it can transform her own pieces as well. “I do loads and loads of sampling, but then sometimes, for instance, with, "Say you love me", the original track is "Overture". So the guitar sample in "Overture", I was singing on top of that, but there was too much going on. So I made "Overture" as a separate track and then I did new chords, which is something I've done a couple of times on the album as well. This kind of thing of; okay, I have this sample, I'm just going to do a top line on top and then I remove the sample and put some other notes.”

Her process of pulling threads of ideas, shaping them into something new, and then pulling further strains from that material into a separate song continues not just in her composition and production, but also in her approach to lyrics. Two songs on the album follow in sequence, but share lyrical threads – “Everything is Unreal” segues into “Staying Here” and shares a lyrical theme. It’s not a coincidence, according to Sonne. She explains, “I moved to London one and a half years ago, and the first year I lived here I was ill all the time. So this is a fever session with me trying to get some sunlight in a park, and I did those lyrics. It was this feeling of coming out of something. I'm really fever-high, and I can't really understand what's going on around me. And then this needs to stop, I need to make a decision. Should I stay in London? Should I go back to Denmark? And I think those two tracks in combination kind of simulates that process in a way. It's more bright when "Staying here" comes in, and it's like, okay, I've made a decision. This is what's going to happen.”

While she’s making sense of internal experiences, layering influences and experimenting with sonic fabric, she’s also very conscious of one aspect that continues through her music; the notion of spaciousness. “I want there to be space. When I'm writing music, I think a lot about trios or duos. So when I look at it, [I ask myself] what is going to be the duo? What is going to be the trio? Then I can kind of tell if elements stand the test. I don't want to put anything in it that doesn't really need to be there. It's a tricky process, because the more you listen to music you're making, you fall in love with different elements. But I found it quite helpful thinking of it that way.”

Great Doubt reflects a new branch in Astrid Sonne’s creative path, and the combination of her sonic and newfound lyrical exploration makes a potent blend. Innovation and expression bind to become revelatory. However, she makes no predictions for her next move - it will only unveil itself in her experimentation. “This is what I came up with in that process, and maybe in the next album it's going to sound completely different. I have no idea. Maybe I won't even use my voice. It's been really interesting and very difficult, but also really rewarding. It's an interesting place at the moment, for sure, I don't know where we'll go.”

Follow Astrid Sonne on Instagram and Bandcamp

Text and interview: Kevin McHugh

Photos: Conrad Pack