Dive. Ilsha

For the second time this year Tiny Room Records releases a folkish singer-songwriter album by a Dutch singer. One living in London, Geri van Essen and this week Rotterdam based Ilsha. Dive is an album with an extremely pleasant, dreamy quality. Celtic references are just as easy to conjure up as a tell-tale world filled with faries and elves.

Ilse Hamelink, as Ilsha's name is in the rest of her life, touches upon her own emotions while writing her songs and plays with the emotions of her listeners, as she manages to get her emotions across and thus influence the mood of myself as listener.

Dive seen form a purely musical point of view is a small album, in sense of the sound, the way the instruments are played and production. Seen from the effect the singer and her accomponiment manage to reach for and attain, the impact is much larger. In the second song, 'Mountains' the words "in the mountains" is repeated over and over and over in the second half of the song. Repetition has only two potential outcomes, either one gets bored and learns nothing or one gets under the influence, under a spell, to come out the wiser. The outcome, for me, in this case, certainly is the second option. While the sentence is repeated, almost like minimal music, the music oh so slowly shifts, creating a different palet of sound on offer. The song from the outset has an almost otherworldly quality, as if I'm allowed a peak view into another world where tranquility is the standard and not the daily life of endless impulses that is 2021. Ilsha is totally herself here, although at the beginning of 'Mountain' Elenne May's best songs come to mind quite easily, She reached for the stars and sailed there with ease it seems.

The music on offer on Dive is of a quality that it is almost begging me to write that I'm thinking of Enya, to name a well-known example from the past, but this would sell Ilsha short by a mile or two. For the simple reason that I an truly mesmerised by the music on Dive and bored after three songs on an average Enya, or Clannad, album. (Full disclosure, I have only one album with 'Orinoco Flow on it.). Dive fully escapes this world, like a hot air balloon, with only one certainty, at some point we, Ilsha, musicians, I, will all have to come down. Just what happens in the final song. Dive allows the listener to escape for twenty minutes or so and leave it all behind. No worry in the world is left when listening to Dive. The fact that the mini album keeps me spell-bound for the whole length tells it all.

With Dive Ilsha offers, relaxation, escape, contemplation, warm love and a soft coming down, as the final song, 'Black Hands', is the most wordly sounding song on Dive, without losing any of that quality the whole album has. Could one ask for more?

Wout de Natris