Artist: @soelaela
Buy/Stream: www.linktr.ee/scissorandthread

Soela is the DJ and production alias of Elina Shorokhova, a Russia-born Berlin-based experienced pianist and vocalist who has made a hugely impactful transition into electronic music.

Having released material on such labels as Kompakt, Dial, Shall Not Fade, Lost Palms, E-Beamz, Red Ember Records, Sushitech, and others, Soela joins the ranks of Scissor & Thread for this exquisite album - Dark Portrait. 

The album opens in a typically understated manner with Unsuitable - a melancholic trip-hop adjacent track that sets the tone for the next 8 pieces. As Soela explains, “I was dealing with some very complex feelings, so I came up with this album, which helped me not to despair, to work on myself, to grow internally, and to start listening to myself. It helped me to keep sane when my country invaded Ukraine with a full scale war. It absolutely broke my heart, and music was one of my main salvations.” 

This complex mix of emotions plays out across the album with tracks that utilize her beautiful musicality (Through the Windows feat. Francis Harris and Philipp Priebe, Drowning feat. Module One) and ear for details with skittering beats, ambient soundscapes (Spirits, Lost In The Fog) and lose-yourself dancefloor moments such as the collaboration with Lawrence on February Is Not Going To Be Forever. The title track Dark Portrait combines dubby elements with affecting pads and melodic touches, while the lead single Even If I Ask You Stay delves into multiple feelings around escaping toxic situations, and battling depression. It features a powerful vocal from Soela supported by a deeply affecting arrangement. The closing track The Darkest Hour Before Sunrise brings a sense of hope and light, balancing subdued keys and strings with ethereal tones and atmospheres

Dark Portrait

Soela - Dark Portrait

Lofty, piercingly deep synth and electronic sounds and matching accompanying moments for those deep or deep house sounds harshly nestling within me while exploring and mentally capturing this world, exercising or expressing myself, a merging of circumstances I have a dogged affinity for. The depths of the emotions rolling in my sombre heart escape to the outside world only out of this spooky, floaty medium, the outputs of synthesisers... I guess my SoundCloud is to simply make a note of as well as share music I love, music I find wonderful and music important to me, my memories in a city environment and my approaches to life at the times or during the phases when I would listen on repeat to certain songs... And I wish I had never deleted my old or original SoundCloud, which was richer with playlists and songs I didn't make a note of and have now forgotten and ran from spring 2014 to early 2018. I mainly am into deep house and melodic ambient and minimal or melodic techno music, or music with associated sounds provoking the thought of a heavy journey unique to yourself or the progress of groundbreaking work or merely a speedy late night stride or ramble in solitude, but I like to classify or refer to my taste in music as me simply loving deep, wistful, melodic percussive sounds without any genre titles acknowledged. I would like to think I have a reasonable eye (or ear) for picking out/noticing when I hear what I’m aiming for, memory-inducing, beautiful or more endearing music very much in the specific realm of the shade of deep house and melodic IDM I am most into as the auditory material from which a range of heartfelt visualisations, feelings and reminiscences spring in me. As we all may do over time, I would think I sort of have developed an individual, intricate sense for music which evokes a sense of there being something deeply felt, sombreness, seriousness, complexity or overwhelmment. I’ve looked out for beautiful deep-sounding music since I began to listen to deep house in 2010 through 'pirate' UK radio stations back then like Unknown FM, Passion FM, Select FM and Point Blank FM. I have a real enthusiasm in me for such music, along with any clear mergers between it and classical musical instruments, and especially an enthusiasm in the ideas I get within myself and in the back of my mind of relating the sounds I am hearing and used to in the deep house music genre to sceneries or landscapes or visual moments around me in life. For instance, I relate and associate music with viewpoints, memorably distinct lines of sight I randomly come across, specific locations with a bubble of buildings of a certain form of architecture to them, and varying urban or less urban places within the city and countryside settings I've hugely explored the wide-ranging sights and suburbs of, and landscapes beyond. In honesty, I'd only love to better capture the basic concept I'm getting at by recreating exactly it in audiovisual ways... The deeper, the ever darker, and unwaveringly starker.

Also on: @wistfuldeep

Scissor & Thread is cut from a different cloth than your average dance imprint.

Soela - Dark Portrait

Scissor and Thread