Vanessa Amara

Vanessa Amara, a Danish duo formed by Birk Gjerlufsen and Sebastián Santillana, emerged from Copenhagen’s experimental scene in connection with the label Posh Isolation, which releases their recordings. Their music sits at the crossroads of deconstructed pop, contemporary music and experimental approaches that play with collage, cutting and the displacement of reference points. The duo works notably with samples of classical music, fragmented voices and discontinuous structures to produce short, often elliptical pieces in which the song appears in shards. For Vanessa Amara, the absurd and the off-kilter are central, without detracting from a clear attention to timbre, silence and contrast. Through releases and appearances in contexts ranging from research-oriented music to the margins of the pop scene, Vanessa Amara has developed an identifiable writing style made up of precise montages, incomplete melodies and back-and-forths between classical inheritance and a very contemporary treatment of form.