The wind now whistles softly through the freezing cold, and a towering blanket of snow puts the entire world on mute. In this surreal, homogeneous mass, where trees, buses and bushes blend and blur into one another, an old stone church rises like a lighthouse out of nowhere: Studio Cimetière. This secluded spot in the Canadian backwoods became the creative hub for Wash My Pain Away, Femi Luna‘s second studio album. The spirit of the space hums beneath each of the twelve tracks. Clearly, the natural reverberation of the former church shapes the sound; but Femi Luna also plays with silence, rhythm and deliberate gaps in her songwriting, allowing words and sounds to find their own place.
Thematically, the songs move between loss, longing and self-reflection, yet they are carried by warm timbres and careful instrumentation, making it all too easy to lose oneself in Femi Luna’s emotive world. ‘Wash My Pain Away’ is an album that initially impresses with its spatial breadth, but whose strongest effect unfolds in the close, quiet and fleeting moments.
Questions and Answers
3 FACTS
1: Live is not happening in your screen. Go outside. Go to (live) events.
2: A shooting star is 1 to 10 millimeters in size.
3: When I was younger I often baked cakes on Friday just to eat the batter.
11 QUESTIONS
1. What is the biggest inspiration for your music?
Conversations, space, time, thoughts, experiences- everyday life, my and other lives.
2. How and when did you get into making music?
I grew up with music around me and had the chance to learn instruments in class and by myself. I’ve always preferred to improvise rather than stick to the notes and practice them. In my late teens, I started writing my first songs.
3. What are 5 of your favourite albums of all time? (yes we know it is difficult).
Ufff ..out of my gut let’s go with these five for now:
Angie McMahon – Salt
Saya Gray – SAYA
Daniel Norgreen – Alabursy
Sade – Diamond Life
Buena Vista Social Club – Buena Vista Social Club
..ask me again tomorrow haha.
4. What do you associate with Berlin?
A Place where many things come together and intersect. And Friends who live or lived there who do music or sports and follow their passion and dreams.
5. What’s your favourite place in your town?
It depends what day it is and what mood I’m in. Therefore I have many options and favorite places here. One for sure is my home.
6. If there was no music in the world, what would you do instead?
I would sew more often and spend more time at the workshop building or would have my own workspace. I can’t imagine a life without creating.
7. What was the last record/music you bought or listened to?
System by Prewn
8. Who would you most like to collaborate with?
Don’t speak all your dreams out loud (;
9. What was your best gig (as performer or spectator)?
Another difficult question. Let’s take two from this year. As a spectator I went to see To Athena in June, that was really amazing. As a performer it was this summer at Winterthurer Musikfestwoche when I played with my whole band at the church venue. That was beautiful and felt so good.
10. How important is technology to your creative process?
Not really for writing the songs, but for the later steps of recording simple demos and of course the final record.
11. Please tell us more about how your new album ‘Wash My Pain Away’ came about.
Most of the songs I wrote while I stayed in Vienna for half a year. During that time I was also looking for people and places to work with. I needed something that pushes me out of my comfort zone. That leaded me to “Studio Cimetière” in Canada where I recorded this album together with Michael Dubue, who produced and mixed it. The whole recording process taught me a lot about letting go and trusting the process and that couldn’t match the themes of the songs better.
