Avital Rolnick – The Space Between [LP]

"Gorgeous, this. Introduced to A Colourful Storm by Maxine Funke, Avital Rolnick makes delicate, melancholy bedroom folk that'll appeal to anyone into Eddie Marcon, Sibylle Baier or Vashti Bunyan.

"How can you not remember," Rolnick asks on the opening track, 'Song in the Palm of My Hand'. And it's almost as if she's talking to herself, recalling an earlier sketch that's been absorbed into a different frame. Her songs are beautiful, strangely familiar dream-folk expositions that hang in the air, dissipating as they develop. They're strangely complex, too; appearing on the surface as relatively bare-boned singer-songwriter recordings, but filled with tiny details: ticking clocks, swirling flutes, distant synths and barely audible environmental recordings. But at the center of everything is Rolnick's voice, annunciated in archaic Rabbinic phrases that recount lost loves, dashed hopes and the kind of loneliness that weighs on the soul.

Head straight to 'Soon I'll Run Out of Air', the track Rolnick submitted to A Colourful Storm's 2024 compilation of the same name. The track betrays all of her secrets: the sheer latent power of her voice and the modest compositional choices that hit like a brick. "I'll think of a mother, trying to put her child to sleep," she coos. "Of a traffic jam on a hot summer's day / Of how I also feel this way." And her formula dissolves like ink on water on 'Silence' as her voice sails though a sea of psychedelic synths and growling basses, separating the sides with a bold aesthetic choice that completely suits her subject matter. It's music that feels completely at home on the label, not just next to Rolnick's pal Maxine Funke, but next to records from Zbigniew Preisner, Elodie and Troth too.

Gorgeous."

A Colourful Storm, 2026