Eleonora Kampe is a singer from Estonia and Latvia who aside from sending through a wonderful track for vol.2 of our Living Within Our Means series, I know almost nothing about. A few scattered bio’s across the vastness of the internet point at inspirations such as Diamanda Galas and Meredith Monk, and there’s clearly something fairly theoretical underpinning her approach. ‘Breathing In Spring’, much like the name suggests, focusses on a minimal exploration of the breath of the voice, a lapping back and forth of pants and singular vowel sounds. It’s hypnotic, reducing human vocality to an almost bell-like resonance, the listener transported through the body and to some mythical back yard, deposited beneath a set of living wind chimes rocking in the wind.
A similar approach is present on ‘Undiscovered Reality’, a video-work premiered by Culture as a Dare: the voice here more animalistic, a pained and muffled howl that seems to emanate from the bottom of some eternally hidden diaphragm. The video is impressive – documenting a live performance work involving an amplifier hanging from he ceiling, the singer pushing pulling against it as they explore the variety of distorted, warbling voices that can be wrought from the human frame.
If this all sounds a little strange for your particular tastes, then Eleonora can also be found fronting the blues-rock duo ‘Kaev’. As someone who can’t hear the words ‘blues rock’ without automatically assuming it will be shit, this is actually pretty solid, retaining enough of the singers weird-icisms to life the guitar out of the trite depths of dessert-blues and into a far more unique territory.
Check out Eleonora’s various projects below:
https://ringhold.bandcamp.com/album/kaev
https://meansmag.bandcamp.com/track/eleonora-kampe-breathing-in-spring
Daniel Alexander Hignell-Tully
MEANS 