"Music to be played in a Dymaxion House at the 1939 World Fair.
Music for sad Japanese fairy tales.
Music for that scene in The Man Who Fell to Earth when the alien demands of Candy Clark, “I want
to hear people singing. Find me people singing.”
Music to use as a song track for when they make Teletubbies for grown ups.
Music for Imagineers.
Music for a saturday snowstorm.
That’s it, I think.
I listen to Soulo on my headphones and watch the storm blowing outside. I could do this all day.
Soulo has created an atmospheric record and so watching the weather works rather well. It looks
so cold outside--how pleasing it is to be inside, warm, watching the world go white. But despite
the atmosphere it creates, this Soulo music is not simply electronic or techno or ambient. It certainly
has elements that are electric and tronic; technological and technical, and certainly it creates an
ambiance. But there are opposite forces at work as well. Acoustic and analog sounds. Melo-
dies with anticipation and returns. Repetitions, but the repetitions of pop music rather than the
repetitions of drone/dirge. This is not music about machines; it is music about dreams. Synthetic
sounds are juxtaposed to real strings. The voices are at a distance and processed, yet it is hard
not to feel the longing in the singing.
Soulo makes use of all these disparate elements to create something beautiful and original. They
create a genuinely haunting sound. What makes it so? They use elements that sound familiar
and make them unfamiliar and odd by altering context. I hear things that remind me a bit of The
Beatles’ Because, with its mix of moog and acoustic guitar and echoic voices; a bit of Beck’s Sea
Change with slide guitar and melancholy and flute; a bit of Big Star’s Sister Lovers; a little Smile-
era Beach Boys (at their most choral and atmospheric); even what sounds like doo-wop (albeit
space-age doo-wop). Part of the joy of music for me is the mix of familiar with the unusual, the mix
of expectation and surprise. I feel a kind of nostalgia and emotional recognition in this music, but
Soulo never fails to unwind those references and never fails to torque them into their own original
sound.
You can listen over and over to this album. You can watch weather and not be bored. You will
be lulled by the washes of voices and the rising swells of sound. But there are so many quirks,
so many distinctions in the songs. It is beautiful and melodic but also dissonant and blurred. It is
elegiac and sentimental and even radiant but also ironic and funny and playful. .
Music for monorails, locomotives, skyscrapers and satellites."
- Dana Spiotta, author of Eat The Document