Sound & Vision Musica just reviewed “Figment Of Your Imagination” by Linda Smith.
If you want to test your Spanish click here
If you trust my Spanish, here’s an English translation for you:
“We are going to tell you about the sonic history of Linda Smith, an American singer-songwriter who recorded an impressive amount of homemade material between 1987 and 2001, much of it going unnoticed by the industry and, instead, being preserved as a privilege of only a few scholars of the artistic values of the Baltimore underground scene, as well as a few lucky others around her.
It’s not like she was a total stranger before, either. During the eighties she played in the punk band, The Woods, but it is true that most of her musical career has been on her own. Over time, she has come to release all kinds of records: from a selection of poems by Charlotte Mew that she herself set to music and instrumental fragments inspired by the classical music of Tchaikovsky, to classic cassette editions of singles, EPs and LPs of total own authorship that, thanks to new masterings that put them in CD and digital versions, today we can know and continue enjoying in a better audio quality.
Her tracks, generally classified as lo-fi and bedroom pop, are influenced by the spiritual evolution of human beings, lost romances in urban areas and the nostalgia that invades the city and our lives. She often experiments with electronic music and the soporific tricks of ambient, and then performs classily on the slow core of brittle guitars. All this amalgamation of sound elements make her work very unpredictable, of course.
Even her most recent releases as singles show little hints of shoegaze, melodically they are as romantic and catchy as possible: a very common combination in this musical genre.
Listening to Linda Smith’s old compositions in these times produce a strange but at the same time pleasant sensation of being witnesses of a sonic journey in time, not precisely of ourselves but of a voice that came from the past towards us, accompanied by her transparent soul that tells us some stories that no one heard at the time but it is important that we know that they happened. It is the testimony of an artist who waited long enough for her art to touch some hearts, for her emotions to be conveyed in this space, perhaps now achieving greater success than it could have been at the time. We cherish this treasure salvaged from an exotic old trunk of memories.”
(Sound & Vision, October 25th, 2022)
You can listen to ”Figment Of Your Imagination” here.
