Mörmaid shares lead single "We Love We Dive" taken from her upcoming debut EP Push Pull via Beat Palace.
Mörmaid, aka Oslo producer / songwriter Live Sollid, a former jazz student with touchstones including Grimes, fka Twigs and SOPHIE, is excited to announce details of her debut EP. The five-track Push Pull will be released 18th November via Beat Palace, and today she shares its lead single "We Love We Dive".
Launched alongside a suave visualiser, the six-minute track is unashamedly maximal, with synthesizers and sequencers whirring forwards and rhythms intertwining. Probing live electronics with sampling, field recordings and vocals processed to manipulate her sound is something that’s within Mörmaid's both spirit and practice. “We Love We Dive” encapsulates this perfectly, with Sollid’s vocal sometimes pushed right up close to the speaker, or opened up so that it feels like it’s trying to fill a cavernous space without breaking the emotional thread.
""We Love We Dive" is probably the first love song I've ever written. It's primarily hopeful and positive, but it also addresses that a romantic relationship isn’t always easy and wonderful. People and relationships are flawed, but surely we want what's real - including the struggles that come with it - because that's the most fulfilling kind of love, I think"
Mörmaid on "We Love We Dive"
Live Sollid's Mörmaid is the second signing to DJ and Metronomy musician Anna Prior’s new Beat Palace label and her debut EP Push Pull is an introduction to a new sonic world: mutated glacial pop mixed with quickly shifting rhythms, freeform improvisation scuttle across expansive ambient plains, and throbbing sub bass underpin soaring vocal melodies.
“Mörmaid was born in 2020 when I felt that I wanted to take my music in a slightly different direction that could live on its own away from my own name,”
“Then my songs became more beat based and I started experimenting more with different production techniques. I moved to London in 2019 and was introduced to a lot of new music, like SOPHIE, Grimes, Arca and FKA twigs, which hugely inspired me to try out more extremes in my own music.”
explains Sollid.
Live Sollid has always been naturally inquisitive musically. Moving through instruments as a child – including three years spent learning the harp – she wound up focusing on her voice at 16, studying mostly pop and rock styles in college before spending years on various forms of jazz. Plenty of her early innovation exploring that genre has translated into her more recent music.
“I like seeing where these extremes can take me,”
she says.
“This can be extreme contrasts, big versus small spaces, chord and rhythm changes, vocal experimentation or different textures. It might not end up sounding so extreme in the end but going there breaks a barrier and gets me to places I wouldn’t have gone without it. I really enjoy using my background from free improvisation and jazz and playing with sound design in that way.”
What strikes most about Mörmaid’s work though is that, even though largely created in isolation it constantly feels like a conversation. Sollid brings in elements where they’re not expected, while her manipulation of her own vocals not just dynamically but structurally often gives the feel of a call and response going on between the artist and herself. It’s something that – again – goes back to her jazz roots, even if the veneer of her music is far more synthetic than that.
“In jazz and improvisation it’s so much about listening to those you play with in a way that makes you almost forget yourself, where what is created in this space between you and your bandmates is the most important thing,”
“Even though is a solo project, that has definitely affected me. It’s just being very aware of what’s happening in the soundscape and how everything in it interacts.”
Push Pull is a breathtaking first step for Mörmaid, who looks set to be a polymath artist in the rich lineage of the likes of Björk, Arca or even her compatriot Jenny Hval. In funnelling her extensive musical background into the pop form, Live Sollid is creating music that looks into the future and exists in a space all of its own.