"In My Arms Many Flowers" (Quiet Sonia song)

The imagery in Marianne Skaarup Jakobsen’s video for Quiet Sonia’s “In My Arms Many Flowers” is like a collage of negative images super imposed on others with colors manipulated to look like something from decades past. And with the images in motion it flows with an organic drift like the way memories are stored in the mind. The music itself in its intricate web of melody and texture, acoustic guitar, strings, swells of tone. Impressionistic lyrics spoken/sung by Nikolaj Bruus in a weary matter of fact, thoughtful tone are offered in short poetic sketches. Like a piece written inspired by urban decay and the neglect of culture as manifested physically in the landscape and in the lived experiences of people as if everything can be plugged directly into a system to drive short term profits and barring that limited and ever changing utility cast aside. Lonely piano notes seem to mark the time throughout the song but especially as it heads toward the fading outro. But there is a reprise wherein the song proper ends on a note of hopeful resignation. An underlying theme to the song appears to be how we are all part of one big, interconnected cycle of being and that our individual place in the impermanence of being is as actor, as witness and as quantum impetus for what comes after. One might liken it to a post-rock song but it seems to have more in common with the likes of experimental jazz/ambient composers like Steve Tibbetts and John Hassell among other such artists on the ECM imprint in the 1980s with its crafting of tone, pacing and texture. Listen to “In My Arms Many Flowers” on YouTube and marvel at how it’s more than ten minutes seem to pass so quickly and follow Quiet Sonia at the links below. The All Black Horses Came Thundering EP from which “In My Arms Many Flowers” is drawn is out now on Pink Cotton Candy Records.