Henriette Sennenvaldt, the former frontwoman of the acclaimed, boundary-defying Danish band, Under Byen, delves further into the far edges of jazz-pop on her debut solo LP, Something Wonderful out this Friday via Paper Bag Records. Today, she releases “Very Fantastic”, a dark jazz lament carried by Sennenvaldt’s soft whispers and swelling orchestral horns. Addictive to the ear, it rewards the patient listener with a tune both generous and strange. Inspired by watching technicolor musicals, Bambi, and The Godfather as a kid and listening to Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, Sennenvaldt shares, “I consider it both lament and ode, a burial procession. It’s sort of a field recording – reporting on bombasticness, and overwhelmedness, and claustrophobia. And – like many songs of this album – it’s also about light and luminosity, the shimmering of in-between, disintegration, melting, union."
Stream / Share: “Very Fantastic”
Listeners were previously ushered into Henriette’s mysterious music space with album opener and lead single, "New Skill" and the evocative, haunting “Clumsy”. Throughout Something Wonderful, horns blow – feverishly, delicately, confused, or structured – in the richly instrumented arrangements’ collage-like style that encourage each voice to do more than merely accompany. They contradict each other, often appear out of joint, approach and leave abruptly or softly, and form a continuity of interruption that carves out a choppy, precarious groove someplace between fragility and possibility. The album was recorded by Peter Barnow, Nils Gröndahl, Mike Hillier, John McEntire and Henriette Sennenvaldt in various sessions in Chicago, Copenhagen and London over 2016 - 2019.
