Carmen Villain (Carmen Hillestad) is the latest signing on Smalltown Supersound (Lindstrøm, Todd Terje, Neneh Cherry, Annie). Carmen – who freely admits to an obsession with American avant weirdos Sun City Girls – draws on a lineage of sprawling lo-fi rock: Sonic Youth, Royal Trux, Broadcast, Bikini Kill. But equally she admires the cut ’n’ paste productions of J Dilla, Wu-Tang Clan and English avant garde post-punkers This Heat. Her 2013 debut album Sleeper is a tempestuous, psychedelic and dreamlike set of songs with a defiantly DIY underground free-rock sound. Mostly recorded in a former nuclear bunker in Oslo, half of the album was produced by Carmen herself, the other half by Emil Nikolaisen (Serena Maneesh), with one track a collab/co-production with fellow Norwegian cosmic hero Prins Thomas (who also sequenced the album). “dulcet drone-pop meditations as supple as raw silk . . . Her singing seems to come from a place on the edge of sleep, where the Sandman takes the shape of a '60s girl group muttering trance-inducing mantras. . . a molten sound, part electric folk and part industrial primitive, that shifts imperceptibly between soft-focus haze and cutting relief.” (SPIN Magazine) Read more on Last.fm.