'Remember We Were Waiting For The Snow' is a series of "sound poems" offering variations on the feeling of "solastalgia": our anxiety, our concern about the disappearance of certain natural phenomena due to climate change. How to imagine a world without snow when a whole part of life in the Nordic countries is structured around rituals linked to the arrival of winter. The silence of nature is not that of a world without birds; muffled footsteps in the snow are not an icy hell without an echo. This album was written before Žils Deless-Vēliņš moved to Latvia 5 years ago during improvisation sessions spanning 3 days. Some titles are part of the Latvian vocabulary such as Lasteka (name designating the peaks of ice descending from the roofs) or Auseklis (the eastern star guiding in the winter night), as well as the reference to the Daugava, the main river of Latvia where people spontaneously come to fish when its ground is frozen. We recognize here the references to Neil Young or the tenderness of Jim O'rourke's instrumental folk albums.

Remember We Were Waiting For The Snow

Crossing Daugava

Žils Deless-Vēliņš has a mystical relationship to sound and music since he was a child and his crafting of music can be compared to a construction kit game, where music as a whole is more than the sum of sounds. For him, sound has
some sort of kinship with the concept of pneuma in Stoician philosophy. Sound expects to be found to become music, lying there in an intuitive background. He worked on a wide range of experimental projects, as a songwriter, sound engineer, and co-founder of French-based label We Are Unique! Records.
Deless tries to consider music as a thinking process among many others like philosophy, or
psychoanalysis (a lot of Empty Spaces sounds have been recorded between sessions with his patients). More recently he started to work on video making and did Vjing for the band he has been working with. Deless did not choose a specific path in music and sound : his identity can be puzzling has he didn’t write music only in “experimental” style. His musical approach can be compared to Jim O’rourke in a sense, according to the variety of style they both try to embrace. The most extreme feedback potentially contain poetry or meaning. Gilles can feel sometimes like a “musician without quality” as Ulrich in Musil’s novel.
He is now based in Latvia where music is a ground for everyday life, and essential to Latvian identity. He started a YouTube channel which be dedicated to sound and music techniques, and has a forthcoming project dedicated to interview with Latvian classical contemporary composers.

Crossing Daugava

Lunt