Alma Elste – Virtualism: New music Jul 22nd 2013, 09:15
Influenced by classical as well as "mainstream junk", Parisian Alma Elste makes brilliantly indefinable pop
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Apparently 21-year-old Parisian Alma Elste's delicately sweeping debut single Virtualism is about "baseball, summer breeze and video games in a hyperreal world". If this all sounds a bit too Lana Del Rey for its own good then fear not, that's sort of the point. We think. "I like to see music as a flat land or a panorama. More like an instant happening than something to judged," she explains. "The point with Virtualism was to recreate a mainstream melody with very naive, teen-sounding lyrics, that brings us back in the early 2000s, and that also sounds superficial but at the same time emotional." Sidestepping the Instagram-filtered faded nostalgia of Del Rey's mini-symphonies, Elste chooses instead to set her brilliantly detached vocals ("I stole some baseball cards" manages to sound deliciously menacing) within a mesh of frayed synths and slowly pulsing beats. A fan of everything from electronic music to classical (Bach, Scriabin and Webern, apparently) to more "mainstream junk like Justin Bieber", Elste, currently unsigned, is clearly still finding her own sound, but Virtualism's unique sonic hybrid is a pretty strong start.
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