Nymphya 'Dream Dance'
Beautiful Wounds – Nymphya's Dream Dance channels Animism, Art-pop and the Avant-garde
“In the music world you’re supposed to specialize,” says Nymphya, aka Valentina Osinski, a Pennsylvania native whose debut album, Dream Dance, an eclectic mix of art-pop, folktronica and the avant-garde, at times defies words, “my brain is much more naturally curious about many things.”
What strikes the listener upon first encounter with Dream Dance is that it is at once challenging and accessible. Its comforting warmth is full of unusual juxtapositions and unexpected flashes of darkness. Opener “Entering the Glade” is an ambient piece which displays the strength of that genre’s ability to move and subsume. Literal footsteps take us into an otherworldly place where shades of light, wordless singing, and embryonic synths concoct a feeling of excitement and unease. It is a fitting starting point for an album which intends to guide the listener on a journey.
Nymphya
Follower “Over the Hedge” opens with driving acoustic guitar before melting into an electronic backbeat which lends the track a suitably propulsive edge. Both of these pieces showcase what is perhaps Valentina's biggest asset: her voice. As a professional opera singer with years of experience, the vocals on Dream Dance are pervasive and powerful, yet nuanced and affecting.
“I wrote my first song when I was six,” she tells me, “on an old accordion found in the attic – perfect for a Polish family!” She then progressed to guitar, receiving her first lessons in music theory and singing. In college she played in local rock bands. “When I graduated,” says Valentina, “I started taking voice lessons for the very first time with Julianne Baird, a well-known soprano, and thus began my sojourn into the classical music world.” This is an understatement. Valentina’s talents have seen her perform opera and other theatrical works across the United States, garnering a plethora of accolades. She has shared stages with Todd Rundgren, John Cale, and George Benson among others. She has appeared on MTV, The Tonight Show, and at the Fillmore Auditorium. All this makes her debut solo album all the more intriguing.
Title track “Dream Dance” is in itself a perfect calling card, swaying from sitar, guttural murmurings, and off-kilter drums to a shifting electro-acoustic backdrop over which we hear Valentina’s lyrics (co-written with Gentry Bronson) for the first time. “These words are our children, these songs are our homes,” she sings. There’s an undeniable New Age tint to Nymphya’s music, where interwoven guitar, flute, and voice project a primal nature-worshipping feel. However this is not background music. It asks much of the listener and warrants repeated visits.
No doubt the eclecticism, depth of feeling, and contrasting light and darkness that runs throughout the album owe much to the personal story which in part inspired it. “I had an incredibly powerful, deep, and meaningful love affair with Keith Keller, who was a roots music producer in New Orleans,” says Valentina. “I had that unmistakably mystical moment of knowing that I had met him before, in another time and place.” When Keith died suddenly and unexpectedly, it left her distraught. “The depth of my despair and wretchedness had no words,” she tells me, “I knew that I needed to make at least part of this recording an homage to him; to capture what he gave me, what he taught me, and who he was.”
Nymphya
“Wasteland” is the album’s centerpiece, an eight-minute-long meditation on hope and despair. It features Nymphya’s typically evocative mix of electronic and acoustic instrumentation with a distinctly Middle Eastern flavor. This is a track which expertly displays the variety which permeates Dream Dance. Many people, not least Valentina herself, have pointed towards Kate Bush as an obvious node of reference, but you could never mistake Dream Dance for a work by the latter. Sonically, what has been created here sounds unique, an admirable accomplishment in and of itself. Its palette draws from the ambient experimentation of Brain Eno and Steve Reich to the crafted harmonies of the Beach Boys. Valentina's songwriting is rooted in emotion: “Looking for you now, where the Sun dies low,” she sings, “but I don’t want to find, what steals my soul.”
“Heart on a Shelf,” is, to my ears, the strongest single cut. It features some wonderfully sparse funk instrumentation and a memorable vocal delivery. Listening to this track you can appreciate the superlatives heaped upon Valentina’s stagework. This is musical theater of the best kind and, indeed, it’s hard to think of anyone apart from Kate Bush who could deliver a line with such twisted emotion and authenticity. “We Carry On,” by contrast, kicks off with an '80s New Wave synth and dance-tempo beat. “Goin’ Home” is a rolling folk tune with plucked strings, tastefully-reserved violin and multi-tracked vocals. It’s a remarkable diversity of sounds.
“I’ve sung on opera stages and played in honky-tonk bars,” says Valentina, “I’ve sung with jazz bands and big bands, I’ve done theatre shows, worked with avant grade outfits…it’s like a stew.” These ingredients produce here an ambitious and well-crafted work which provokes as much it soothes. “My mission,” says Valentina, “is for listeners to step away from this album in the highest sense transformed, and in the very least to have openings in their awareness or their hearts touched; to know that there is a way back from devastation, that there are multiple dimensions of life.”
If the worth of a creative project can to some degree be measured by its intent, then by that criteria alone Dream Dance deserves to be heard.
