Text by Meritxell Rosell
A pale face floats inside a sphere, lips moving and synching in syllables you can’t fully decipher. It feels urgent, insistent, and both human and alien at once—a strange place where language, myth, and meaning dissolve. This is the world of David Norland’s new video for E-Car Soul, premiering today on CLOT Magazine, an advance from his upcoming album La Source (Denovali, 2026).
The English composer, known for his scores for drama and documentaries, as well as his experimental choral and electronic music, tells us that the video’s visual side evolved from the music: for some reason, I always had the picture in my mind of a disembodied face mouthing the syllables. In that sense, Norland had been experimenting with an idea of vocal pointillism on some choral commissions (E-Car Soul was the first experiment he’d made in that direction), focusing for the past few years on exploring how he finds meaning:
I like the idea of breaking texts and sounds into individual syllables and tones, then building a rhythmic and harmonic collage from them. And then from that, having something arise that’s more than the sum of its parts—something that acquires meaning and resonance. It’s very much how I assimilate information, and I wanted to explore that.
From this approach, the image of a head urgently communicating things he couldn’t yet understand naturally emerged. It appeared in the artist’s mind as the natural way to present the music, becoming the face that makes the emergence visible: a vessel for signals that feel urgent but incomprehensible.
The video aesthetic continues this tension, a collision of ancient and futuristic forms. The face rests on a marble-like orb, shaped by Marie Brosius’s artwork for the album. I went through a process of self-disclosure about the record to help her understand my motivations (I hope she gets rid of the text document!), he jokes. Both artists shared a fascination with ancient symbols and architecture, such as strange alphabets, ancient stone doorways and the strange Bauhaus-like ironwork on manhole covers in the street.
Spirituality also pulses beneath the surface. Coming from a non-religious background, Norland has long sought forms of meaning in music. It’s not optional… I often feel that there’s meaning all around me, but I often lack the right language to understand it. Urgent messages are coming through, and yet there is a profound frustration… at my inability to understand them. E-Car Soul embodies that friction: signals that press toward comprehension but always slip just out of reach, a visual and sonic meditation on human perception in a technological world.
Oddly, the figures evoke lunar faces, though, Norland tells us, this was unplanned. The reference, ancient yet uncanny, deepens the resonance: humanised and inhuman simultaneously, a digital soul materialising from sound. A symbology, as he lays it out, that appears very ancient, and yet completely futuristic. Choral music, he notes, has always been one of humanity’s primary spiritual expressions, and he is interested in its spirituality; of it; it’s indivisible from the music itself. and his work distils that impulse into fragments, textures, and pulses that feel both mystical and mechanical. And it’s in this sense that Norland finds spirituality frustratingly hard to connect to at times, my exploration of it inevitably returns to how I find meaning, and the meanings that as yet elude me.
Together, the music and the video are distillations of this place in his life, facing difficult questions about how humanness and the natural world are impacted by the technology he has so willingly let in. Maybe Moore’s Law has an equal and opposite effect on the spirit. But in the video, the music dictates movement, the visuals document intuition. I really love when that happens, Norland says—moments when image and sound converge without mediation, when myth, technology, and human yearning collide.
