Mood Music

WHEN IT COMES TO MAKING MUSIC, MOOD MEANS EVERYTHING to Helena Deland. The Montreal singer-songwriter has to feel a song before she can really do anything with it. This method led to her releasing nine songs this year, as two EPs divided into four volumes under the title From the Series of Songs “Altogether Unaccompanied”.

“We recorded the nine songs as an album at first, but they had all been written at different moments and come from different angles,” Deland explains. “We worked with Jesse [Mac Cormack] on them in a very vertical way. We’d take every song and really get into a specific mood, and then move onto the next song, instead of working on the whole album horizontally.”

What they ended up with just didn’t feel like an album. Her slinky, quixotic songs are intoxicating to the ear; however, blending whispering folk with minimal synth-pop wasn’t an easy task. And so Deland conceived the idea of dividing up the songs and assigning a colour coding system: volume one is day (orange), volume two is night (indigo), volume three is dawn (beige) and volume four is dusk (pink).

“When we finished recording, to me, the pacing of it just didn’t make sense to release as an album,” she says. “I was then seduced by the idea of making it as small as possible, in terms of size of release. For me, having the songs grouped into twos or threes allows me to associate them by colour or just the mood they put me in.

“I’d love for people to hear it the same way,” she adds. “That’s how I consume music. It comes to me very vividly, what music I listen to at what time of day, but I know that’s not the case for everybody. I recommend trying it though.”