Nighttime
Brooklyn, NY | Established. Jan 01, 2014 | SELF
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Replete as I am off a most-thoughtfully prepared vegetarian lasagna-turned-Thanksgiving dinner, I wasn’t entirely sure how an album named Summer EP would fit in with my current stasis. But the five-song EP—recorded this past summer off a battery-powered laptop in Northern Ontario—lives up to its ethereal sales pitch.
It’s a dreamy, chant-filled compilation from Montreal’s Eva Louise Goodman, whose previous album, L’Age D’Or, was released by local Jeunesse Cosmique. This time around she’s opted to go solo, channeling the isolation of a cabin in the woods into haunting loops and ambient reverie.
There’s an unexpected blend of soothing, hypnotic build-up alternating with powerful, masculine chanting—crossing a threshold between a predictable alt folk soundscape and a very traditional gothic. The aptly named “Back & Forth” is the first signal of this exchange, swapping gentle strummings and distant, drifting vocals for the ancient-sounding echoes.
As the vocals build and boom, Goodman weaves in the shrill pull of the strings, and emphasizes the acoustic guitar that seems to stand as the backbone of most of her tracks. “Back and forth/we will sway back and forth,” the disconnected voice sings out as the song rocks you along, amping up and then settling down in its own rhythmic wave.
It’s either a perfect coincidence or an acknowledgment of the distance between the songs that “Back & Forth” is squeezed between “July” and “Siberia,” moving from the restless, open increase of the first track to the steady drifting of the EP’s colder touches. Goodman’s voice soars before leaving the whispers of those powerful notes to trickle out with the atmospheric, sleepy chords dwindling into silence.
The ominous chanting returns yet again for “O What a Misery!” shattering the fantastical peace of withdrawing with a sense of forboding, teeing the EP up for “Farewell Song” as Goodman’s soft voice whistles along with “O what a misery/sensations” on endless repeat.
Summer EP seems to have set out to defy its name, finding more in common with my current feelings about the cold, transitioning woods. It’s isolation, introspection and a lulling drifting that suggests both a warning and a temptation. Lying back and allowing myself to be drawn in, I’m ready to heed the latter. - Grayowl Point
2. Nighttime – L’age d’or (Independent)
I picked up this album by the Montreal-based project at this August’s Summer’s Wane Festival in Vermont, where we were both playing. I’d say Nighttime was the surprise stand-out of the festival, relying on layers of live-looped electric guitar, violin, and vocals. It sounds like driving through foggy rural back-roads and is released on a DIY cassette in a lyrics sleeve, held together by twine. - Heathen Harvest
Nighttime (Sept. 19th, 8PM, Cagibi) – If you like the feeling of pacing the cliffs by the ocean waiting for your lover to come home, having a haunted heart, or just appreciate musicianship that is both thoughtful and inspiring, then you MUST go and listen to what Eva Louise Goodman can do. - BandMark
From the summer haze of Laura Stanley:
Summer Sadness is a common affliction. Under the long shadows of July, idleness leaves too much room for thought and anxiety. In peeling, blistered skin, the heat of August is suffocating. After eyes spend too long on parts exposed, time passes in recovery. The romance of the season finally burns out when freshets of autumn wind revive and sing farewell to misery. - Weird Canada
Discography
Summer EP (October 2015) - independent release
L'Age D'Or (May 2015) - Jeunesse Cosmique
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Bio
Nighttime is the dark and mesmerizing dreamscape of Vermont-native Eva Louise Goodman, a multi-instrumentalist who began her classical training as a violinist at the age of five. At age twelve she unearthed her grandmother’s forgotten guitar and quietly took to experimenting with instrumental and vocal composition, spending long hours crafting songs, hidden in her bedroom or the woods behind her childhood home. Twelve years later, Nighttime still lives in this ethereal world of natural landscape and introspection. Isolated DIY home-recording methods and performances centered around live looping of guitar, violin, ambient noise, and voice craft dense yet elegantly layered soundscapes, suspended somewhere between the droning lull of Grouper and the gauzy melodic pop of Cocteau Twins. In the Fall of 2011, Goodman moved to Montreal to attend McGill University. Outside her studies she quickly immersed herself in the city’s flourishing musical community, contributing violin and backing vocals to a number of diverse and established acts, both on stage and in studio. While gaining experience in collaboration and improvisation, she had the opportunity to participate in a wide array of performances, including a showcase at the NXNE Music Festival in Toronto in 2013. Goodman made her solo debut under the pseudonym Nighttime in December of 2014 and released her premiere 9-track LP L’Age D’Or in May 2015 on Montreal indie tape label Jeunesse Cosmique. This was followed in October 2015 by a self-release entitled Summer EP; a hypnotic 5-track ode to the woods of northern Ontario in which the songs were recorded, aptly described by Canadian music blog Grayowl Point as “a dreamy, chant-filled compilation...channeling the isolation of a cabin in the woods into haunting loops and ambient reverie.” Over the past three years Nighttime has played nearly fifty shows in fourteen different cities. She has been invited to play in the POP Montreal International Music Festival two years running, and has shared the stage with an impressive list of dark folk and alternative acts including Moonface (Spencer Krug of Wolf Parade), Marissa Nadler, Of the Wand and the Moon, and Greg Jamie (O’Death) . In February 2016, Goodman relocated to Brooklyn, New York, where she is currently working on her second full-length release with recording artist Robert Ferbrache.
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