The follow up to the ‘Abunai EP’ is replete with a sense of the spiritual and uncanny, conjuring vivid images of New Mexican, desert landscapes and a search for meaning, deeper meaning. This is exemplified on opening track ‘Ocean’, an ambient excursion requiring the listener to focus on sound, intonations, nothing else.

After the danceable ruminations of ‘Abunai’, this album release takes a step back into the forests from where Artemis emerged and invited us into her peculiar, entrancing world. Vocals take on a more prominent role and provide a fascinating, mildly unsettling counterpoint to the experimental electronic rhythms that fill up the senses to the brim. ‘Fingerprint’ reveals this combination in a collage of echoes, atonal incantations and multiple layers of sound.

You could be within the soundtrack to a lo-fi sci fi movie, drenched in the colour shades of purple, blue, deep green and disappearing within the stems of heat-seeking plant life, feeling unsettled yet cocooned, the tribal pulse of ‘Shoganai’ haunting your waking visions. Next, shorter track ‘PRIDE’ explores terrain previously visited on the EP, the BPMs increasing and the muscularity of her sound providing buoyancy and added drive.

The impetus falls away a little with ‘The Forest Lives in You’, a child-like, off–kilter meditation that never quite grabs the attention, despite sounding like Julee Cruise after she has truly discovered that “the owls are not what they seem…”  ‘Bottleneck’ restores some sense of order, its more obvious echoing, melodic refrain adding a new layer of delicate intensity to the overall sound. Her vocal styling does obscure the message of the lyrics somewhat but the calmness of the backing click track allows the listener to disappear and become absorbed into the hazy, background scenery.

‘Cataract’ renews Artemis’s vision, ideas come back into clearer focus, the voice now subsumed by plainsong, a definite path forward out of the forest, away from the confusion. ‘Remember’ reveals a more naked, vulnerable vocal [‘How hard it was to be grown up / how easy it was to fall’], an impulse borne from the urgency to recount this story, this haunted memory. Her desire is to communicate, experimentally and experientially, ‘running, running, running’ but ‘never going home’. Is her journey about escape from an imagined past? Final track, ‘The Echoes Inside My Head’ tries to offer answers, of sorts, its repeated piano line mixed with keyboard ululations and treated background breathings, a hint of strings and a glowing sense of hope, or renewal perhaps?

As a listener, one feels that this experience has resulted from an intense journey, an exploration of your own vulnerabilities, a chance to look inside and confront fears, unease and to have been cleansed through a purity of approach that electronic compositions provide in such exquisite and intangible ways.

Explore, look within: here lies fascination and a tended garden of time, ready for contemplation.  

Vista is available Now via Bandcamp

Review by Hugh Ogilvie.