Azure

Album

In a world of frenetic exhortations, SKY H1 has taken her own route through the pandemonium, developing her distinct atmosphere of emotive, rave-crushed songs. The widespread success of her first EPs and appearances captured the blurring lines between her foundational experiences in drum and bass, grime, dubstep, and techno, all tilted towards schematic bursts of pop. Azure builds on this foundation and elaborates on a delicate medley of experiences, forms, and functions into an imaginative and quietly ambitious debut album.

Azure was slowly brought to life over the last few years, having been seeded in a live setting. Playing extensively across Europe, and with frequent bouts of touring taking her to the US, Canada, Japan, China, and Russia, SKY H1 has been continuously writing and assembling banks of music to incorporate into club, concert, and gallery settings. More recently, composing for film and video in both cinema and art environments has become a parallel arc of her practice.

The album’s peripheral themes remain oblique, yet they can be felt throughout with immediacy, for those looking. The title, Azure, was chosen to evoke memories of her mother, to whom it is dedicated. The track titles reference the Access Virus synthesiser, an instrument series that made a deep and lasting impression on dance and electronic music in the early years of the new millennium. Somnath Bhatt and Ian Babineau created the artwork, with the cover’s glyph intentionally taking the form of the first letter of the Roman alphabet.

SKY H1’s uncanny gift for corralling a piercing emotive range from austere and future-shocked synthesis is an eloquent accompaniment to her keen sense for arrangement. Never letting her sights drift from forging new terrains, and accepting that the unknown is the most natural.

Release: December 3, 2021

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