Eden Samara & Natalia Podgorska – Rough Night

Rough Night, self-described as “a tragicomedy in seven scenes and an interlude,” is the sound of singer, writer and producer Eden Samara working things out. Pulling focus on an irresistible club pop sound, threaded through with contributions from the best and brightest in contemporary dance music, including Call Super, Shanti Celeste, TSVI and Loraine James, Samara’s debut album is at once a coming of age story and an intimate testament to the challenges of drawing from such personal places. “I think well into our adulthood we still go through cycles of losing ourselves and finding ourselves again, so the album encompasses a cycle of growing pains, then coming out the other end where one might appear the same but inside something has shifted,” the artist explains. “I wanted the album as a whole to sound a bit unpolished, like real people making music with little to no equipment and a lot of heart.” Bounding from cosmic introspection on ‘Ultimatum’ and ‘Interlude’ to the sun-dappled skip and sensual stumble of ‘The Local’ and ‘Growing Into Your New Skin,’ weaving between bittersweet torch songs and near-future sex jams on ‘Sophie,’ ‘D4M,’ and title track ‘Rough Night,’ all the while whipping up an anthem for emotional complexity in the shape of ‘Madonna,’ Samara explores her internal worlds with openness and generosity, bringing us along for the ride no matter how raw and real. It is this exploratory quality of Rough Night that formed the primary inspiration for Samara’s collaboration with friend, artist and animator Natalia Podgorska, a hallucinatory game world modelled around each track from the album. “Rough Night is a journey through internal change and growth, and we wanted to reflect that in the visuals – every song is a different scene that visually represents my internal world,” explains Samara. “The record documents a four year period at the end of my twenties where I totally changed as a person. Some people call it a Saturn return. It was like growing pains – when we grow, we go through all these feelings that are a progressive experience.” Podgorska takes the record’s eight tracks and constructs an intricate ecosystem around each of them, through which a virtual avatar of Samara is free to explore, manifesting her soul-searching into an expansive virtual odyssey. “I loved the idea of having a collection of visual pieces that tie together through music within an album that’s also very coherent,” says Podgorska. “It’s growing pains, it’s growth. I love having something that ties it all together visually. Technically it was a fun challenge to work with music I already had and I could create this world where certain elements of the game engine are reactive to the music, so watching the album video you can spot elements that are not just animated for your pleasure, but respond to beats and certain frequencies.” Starting out in a central hub area that invokes the warm memory of the Toronto neighbourhood bar that ‘The Local’ takes its name from, the titular Rough Night unfolds through landscapes of alien flora and fauna, iridescent bubbles and tentacular speaker stacks, flitting between outer and inner space. In one moment Samara floats through a shoal of richly textured sheets of fabric, rippling in zero gravity, while the next sees her strolling across a rainbow bridge, stepping past neon tracers of jubilant ravers, the spirit of letting loose picked out in shimmering light. Rough Night is out now, on Local Action. You can find Eden Samara on Instagram, Bandcamp, and catch her performing tracks from Rough Night live for the first time on Wednesday, November 16, in support of Bodysync. Tickets are available now. For more information about Natalia Podgorska and her work, follow her on Instagram and visit her website.