Sarah Camille - Vingeslag

Sarah Camilles album “Vingeslag” [Beating wings], is a strong document about movement, proximity, distance, belonging and the world’s merciless waiting zones. Sarah Camille won the Spellemann Music Award for the children’s-record genre last year. With her new album she is now addressing an adult audience, and her songs have their finger on the pulse of our times. Our movements on earth are like a slow dance around the planet. We settle down for some generations, form a family, a tribe, a people, and then we move across an ocean or a savannah to find new places with better living conditions. Our predecessors have done this, and many others are doing this in our world today as the circumstances around us change. And sometimes people who belong together must go their separate ways. Sarah Camille’s new album “Vingeslag” reflects on life in a time where the slow dance around the globe is picking up speed. Asking whether our shoulder blades once were wings that bore us across oceans, she questions how some of us can be so provoked by minor differences, such as skin colour, when the work of creation is so grand and so magnificent. Sarah’s musical style moves in the borderland between popular song, folk and world music. Her expressive voice conveys the beautiful melodies and rich lyrics mellifluously in a transparent and minimalist soundscape. In the band you will hear the percussionist Sidiki Camara, one of Mali’s leading drummers, now residing in Norway. On fiddle we hear Selma French Bolstad (known from the band Morgonrode), and on guitars and bass: Jørn Erik Ahlsen Alkanger. The musicians also provide backup vocals. All the songs on the album reflect in various ways the idea of wings beating, a broad and active concept that can embrace so many things. Many of the songs use the bird’s eye view  to depict a world of contrasts, although the album also focuses on the intimate and personal. Sarah has family in many places far from Norway. She has long felt this distance and the sorrow of having those dearest to her so far away. When the pandemic hit, this distance was amplified, a reality that so many of us had to relate to. The idea of beating wings embraces all these long geographical distances. The songs also include narratives about the child. Sarah reaches back to her inner child, and writes about meeting her own children, the parental role, love, chaos and the bustling world of freedom and obligations. The album is produced by Erik Hillestad