"Quietly I dive into the unknown / Been wanting to go there for so long", Ursina sings, perfectly capturing the mood of serenity and courage of her second album, "When I Let Go". In order to make new choices, old habits have to be broken. Over and over, the songs return to this theme. "Finding the courage to be brave. That's what it's all about." says Ursina. "Let go of what needs to go - it's the mantra that guides me through this album."
A hint of homesickness always hung in the air in the village where Ursina Giger grew up. Homesickness, even before anyone had left. Situated deep in the mountains of Eastern Switzerland, Disentis is an isolated place, quite some distance away from the nearest city. Most young people know they will have to look elsewhere for their future. The sense that sooner or later a parting of ways will follow fuels a quiet strand of melancholy that runs through most music from this region.
Ursina, too, sought her luck elsewhere, first at the Jazz School in Lucerne, then at the Rytmisk Music Conservatory in Copenhagen. "I was always fascinated by the North," she says. "There were mountains like ours, but also the sea and the Northern Lights. Besides, I had been listening a lot to Ane Brun, Björk and José González." The year in Copenhagen had a huge impact on her outlook. "I was able to feed off the self-confidence of the Scandinavian music scene and wrote a lot of songs." Having previously written only Rhaeto-Romanic lyrics, she now began to write in English as well. "The mother tongue was important to me. At the same time, I began to feel constricted by it." Her solution: to sing in both languages. "I feel that the English songs have a different atmosphere than the Rhaeto-Romanic ones. I think that when the two languages appear next to each other without turning it into a big deal, both are enriched."
After her return to Switzerland, Ursina released a handful of EPs, followed, in 2017, by her debut album, "You Have My Heart". This was produced in Berlin by Pola Roy (Wir sind Helden) and placed Ursina's feather-light voice in a pleasingly lo-fi folk-pop context. For the recording of "When I Let Go", Irish producer David Odlum took over the controls. His list of credits ranges from Irish band The Frames with Glen Hansard, to Gemma Hayes or Sam Smith, and to Weird Beard, the band of Florian Egli who plays bass with Ursina and co-wrote many of the songs. What is most striking about the results upon first acquaintance is the glorious expanse of sound and the delicate treatment of detail. The space between the notes is treated with as much care as the notes themselves. This gives the elegant voice ample room to explore and savour the intricate melodic loops that make these glorious songs all the more memorable.
