Helen Svoboda - Headwater

Feature Sounds

Mon 6 Jul 2026 to Sun 12 Jul 2026

Blues Roots

This week’s PBS Feature Album is Headwater from Finnish/Australian double bassist, vocalist and composer Helen Svoboda.

Headwater explores notions of fragmentation, individuality and wholeness, shaped by disparate and
complementary aspects of Helen Svoboda’s practice. Threads and earworms run throughout the record,
forming an abstracted picture of self that unfolds non-linearly – traversing between spaces of lightness
and weight, bound by a sense of youthful curiosity, balanced with expressions of adult intensity.

Across 16 vignettes or ‘miniatures’, the album delves into distinctive sonic worlds built around two double basses, two voices, and electronics; heard as singular and combinatory bodies of material. The ensemble features Helen Svoboda (double bass, voice, composition) with close collaborators Jacques Emery (double bass), Finnish vocalist Selma Savolainen (voice), and Tilman Robinson (electronics, production).
Rooted in a devolved songform, Headwater is glued together by extended instrumental practice, improvisation, and Svoboda’s cultural heritage. It can be experienced as a tapestry that blurs the edges of identity – strange, beautiful, and fluid, like memory itself. As a Finnish-born artist who has lived in Australia since the age of five, Svoboda delves into her heritage through the album’s vocal work, which carries echoes of Finnish folk harmony and traces of invented “Finnish” words, explored in collaboration with Savolainen as the second-voice. Svoboda notes that she does not seek to emulate or replicate this style of music, but has taken and nurtured the seeds of its influence on her musical language into
something deeply personal and intuitive. The instrumental pieces reveal an articulate language, with an expanded approach to the melodic and textural qualities of the double bass. Svoboda’s fascination with timbre is explored with Emery through the interplay of the two basses and Robinson’s electronics, extending traditional understandings of how the double bass might typically operate in a
chamber context. The result is a different sound-realm entirely – heavy, light, and evaporative.

Tune in all this week to hear tracks from Headwater. PBS Members have the chance to win a copy of the album on CD - simply email your name and membership number to before midnight Sunday July 12.

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