Nadia Schilling is a singer/songwriter and landscape architect from Caldas da Rainha in Portugal. On her debut LP Above the Trees, out this past November, the musician combines pastoral folk-leanings with indie-rock instincts, employing strings and piano along the way to craft a disarmingly charming record. Visual artist and videographer Joćo Pombeiro contributes the album’s art, which includes a 24-page illustrated booklet, as well as an amazing video for the song “Kite.”
As a quiet meditation on the loss of love and the expectancy of its’ return, with “Kite” Shilling turns her personal musings into a larger enquiry about the nature of life, asking, “Could our ways be some new kind of bizarre,” before later recounting, “I walked those trails, but they never bring you back.” With a heart-rending lilt to her voice, and accompanied by a patient piano and simmering percussion, the songwriter has a knowing way of turning a light on the darker complexities of life while still painting them in plain-spoken relief.
Director Joćo Pombeiro, whose amazing video for the Nightmares On Wax track “Back To Nature,” which will be included in our upcoming Favorite Videos of 2017, follows suit with another epic, animated offering. “Kite” features Pombeiro’s “clip-art” stylings and “3-D” tableaus, here used to create a teeming panorama of forests, mountains, and lakes. The musician herself even makes a cameo as a train passenger, watching Pombeiro’s landscapes fly-by from her shaded coach.
Watch: Nadia Schilling “Kite”
Nadia Schilling Kite from Joćo Pombeiro on Vimeo.
