Selkie Reflections - Alliyah Enyo and Angel R Selkie Reflections

Alliyah Enyo follows up ‘Echo’s Disintegration’ with an even more immersive followup alongside ambient enigma and Kelela producer Florian T M Zeisig. 

In 2022, Enyo worked with the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop on an epic two-hour composition made fromtape loops inspired by selkies, mythical creatures in Celtic folklore. Contemplating memory, grief and timeitself, Enyo devised a “sonorous myth” installation and performance that drowned her voice in the deep sea,using echo to help parallel the communication of humpback whales. It was powerful enough for her to net theaward for Sonic Arts at the Scottish Awards for New Music last year, and it’s this material that she revisitshere, entering into a dialog with Berlin-based producer Florian T M Zeisig, here adopting a new avatar -Angel R.On the A-side, Enyo distills two hours of the original composition into 11 haunted fragments that ooze inand out of each other like a dream. Reworked at Glasgow’s Green Door studio, she sculpts her voice intoweightless Radigue-style incantations, leaning into the tape loops’ corroded inconsistencies. Enyo’s voicebecomes the selkie’s song: wordless echoes that sound as if they’re being dragged slowly towards the seabed. There are remnants of folk forms in there; we hear traces of church music and Celtic ballads – but sheobscures her influences with dubbed reverb, distortion and repetition. Phrases disappear and re-appear, timebecomes a loop, best absorbed in a single sitting to properly perceive its graceful, sinking bliss. By the end ofthe side, Enyo’s vocals are completely waterlogged, dimmed against Robin Guthrie-like shimmers, all brassy, blurred incantations emanating from the depths of a floatation tank.Florian T M Zeisig responds on the B-side with three flooded, longer-form pieces that will appeal to anyonewho devoured his album of corroded Enya loops a couple of years ago.

Enyo’s voice is now reduced to awhisper, blistered and gauzy expressions that float over dense pads on ‘Untitled I’ before getting lost in theweeds completely on the muggy ‘Untitled II’. On the closing ‘Gates of Heaven’, he sculpts Enyo’s voice until it’sjust an illusory, hypnotic reflection, slow-fading into the aether.