Ivana Carrescia’s latest project blends pop melodies with rich, moody, turn-of-the-millennium deep house. It’s the kind of music that makes you feel like you’re both dancing and floating in space.
The Las Vegas-born musician Ivana Carrescia’s voice flits about the edges of her club tracks like a benevolent ghost. She sings in a downy falsetto that rarely rises above lullaby levels, and she whispers as often as she sings. Her lyrics are mostly just scraps of snapshots, pieces torn from a larger whole and tossed to the wind: the taste of salt, the color blue, flowers in the rain. Much of her time behind the mic yields only wordless expressions—coos, sighs, wisps of tinted air. The first time we hear her voice, 30 seconds into her debut EP’s lead track, “Ischia,” it takes the form of a single reversed syllable, glinting like an apparition before it disappears into velvety dub delay: the echo of a shadow of a specter that haunts a decades-old memory of the dancefloor.
Carrescia used to record under the aliases Ivana XL and Eddi Front, writing wistful, reverb-laden songs for acoustic guitar and piano. Singing of angels, bad breakups, and the Lone Star State, she evoked the watery melancholy of Cat Power and the retro fantasies of Lana Del Rey, her voice faint as a sun-bleached photograph, her upright sounding like it had been through a hurricane or two. She reappeared in 2016 as Gioia with a strikingly different proposition, wrapping breathy singing in abstracted atmospheres and electronic throb—a homegrown style not too far from what Kelly Lee Owens was doing around the same time. But Carrescia’s debut outing as Isola marks an even bigger shift, embracing the rich, moody sound of turn-of-the-millennium deep house.
As she did on Gioia’s lone EP, Carrescia wrote and recorded her Isola debut in collaboration with Godmode head Nick Sylvester (a former Pitchfork contributor). Working remotely between Vegas and Los Angeles, the two exchanged ideas, condensing and arranging their sprawling raw materials—improvised synth jams, homemade soundbanks, tape manipulations, ad-hoc vocals—into streamlined forms. Like Godmode releases from Shamir, Yaeji, and Channel Tres, EP1 stakes out a middle ground between pop and dance music, pairing the melodies of the former with the enveloping flow of the latter. But Isola’s music might be the most unreservedly club-focused of her labelmates’ output—or at the very least, the most narrowly focused on a specific set of references.
She lays it all out on the table with “Ischia,” in which virtually every element is a fine-tuned tribute to Luomo’s 2000 album Vocalcity, from the dubby chords to the snub-nosed bassline to snippets of breath that drift like confetti. This brand of smooth, sophisticated deep house used to be a minor cottage industry, epitomized in tunes like Tom Middleton’s Cosmos remix of Kylie Minogue’s “Chocolate”; it’s been out of favor for so long, it’s a treat to hear it revived. But “Ischia” isn’t merely a good imitation. Hypnotic yet constantly evolving, it strikes the perfect balance of propulsive groove and heady atmosphere—the kind of thing that makes you feel like you’re dancing and floating in space all at once.
“Two Birds” sets its sights on trip-hop, while “La Notte” and “Canis Major” are largely amorphous sketches for voice and piano, but the bulk of the EP is dedicated to recreating late-’90s house and techno at their most immersive. “Ricorda – Tell Me” takes the deadweight bass thump and dub-techno chords of classic Rhythm & Sound and spins them into an eight-minute journey in which, despite the fundamentally repetitive form, no two bars sound alike. “Any Day” is structured around cascading chords that suggest a “Good Life”-type anthem is about to kick off at any moment; instead, the duo plays with expectations, building toward a climax and then pulling back, leaving Carrescia’s voice twisting in the wind just when you expect the drumbeat to drop. As laborious as the writing process may have been, the results feel fluid and spontaneous—linear but perpetually shifting, moving with the gyroscopic surety of a dancer weaving her way through a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd.
The EP reaches its own climax midway through with “Said It Again.” Following the drop-less “Any Day” and then the vaporous “Canis Major,” the song’s chest-caressing sub-bass and crisp, tick-tocking house beat come as an almost physical relief. Pastel chords add depth; Carrescia’s wistful vocal (“And in the nothing night, I cried for you/And in the morning time, I flew the field”) is her most emotionally direct performance on the record. The mix of elements faintly recalls Bodily Functions-era Herbert, another deep-house staple of the new millennium. The whole thing exudes a kind of weary glamor: The synths and voice have the texture of rumpled silk; muted horns shimmer like reflected sunlight on the skyline. I’m transported back to Sunday-morning taxi rides home from the club, ears still ringing. Isola’s music is alive with these moments; at once nostalgic and visceral, it feels populated by the spirits of life-changing nights on the dancefloor.
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