domenica diavoleria

Self-Released in 2025

“Hauntology” is not just a fashionable buzz word or a phantasm of highbrow music critics for Domenica Diavoleria—it’s a (super)natural by-product of her fecund imagination. Olympia, Washington’s premier ambient sorcerer, Diavoleria returns with her best album yet, A City Of Ladies. This magnum opus continues a hot streak that began with the albums Forever Your Salesgirl and Orange Clearing.

The nine tracks on A City Of Ladies draw inspiration from strong women in domestic settings, as well as from the landscape of England’s Norfolk county, where Diavoleria lived in 2023. That being said, much of this record conjures escape hatches from earthly concerns. In “A Daughter Of The Empire,” tranquil, flute-ish whorls of pathos waft over a shimmering galaxy of mysterioso synth emissions. “Clockface” emits the glow of a halogen lamp from the bottom of the ocean. This is ambience of harrowing depth, bearing an ethereal gravitas that echoes through the centuries. “If We Don’t Burn How Will The Night Be Lit?” represents the zenith of Diavoleria’s facility with spooky auras. “With Bells On Her Toes” boasts her most sophisticated and moving melody, aswirl in cathedral dust and ectoplasm. If you ever swooned and shivered to a track by hauntological icon the Caretaker, you will find even more profound pleasures in this chilling album-closer. As with the entire album, “With Bells On Her Toes” will make your headphones feel like a halo. – Dave Segal

Released by Eiderdown Records in 2024.

Coming off the intricately detailed desolation of her 2022 debut LP, Forever Your Salesgirl, Olympia producer Domenica Diavoleria (aka Domenica Clark) returns with another intriguing full-length on Seattle’s long-running home of experimental goodness, Eiderdown Records, titled Orange Clearing. Whereas Salesgirl evoked the hollowed-out feeling of capitalism’s funeral, Orange Clearing is being promoted as a children’s album. (Diavoleria—a former DJ at Hollow Earth Radio and at KAOS in Olympia—wrote and mixed the record while she was pregnant.) If that is the case, then Orange Clearing is for very mature kids who are unafraid of haunting atmospheres.

Sure, “Whirligig” is a beloved fairground ride, but in Diavoleria’s skilled hands, it’s also a portal into a soundworld of microscopic wonders, perhaps the magnified machinations of an earthworm’s nervous system. Named after a defunct Seattle Center attraction, “Fun Forest” takes the form of a soothing drone with undercurrents of distant distress beneath the palliative tones. It’s an exemplar of competing forces, proving again the importance of tension in ambient music. “Tress” creeps eerily into zones that Brian Eno laid down with albums such as On Land and Apollo. So desolate, so minutely beautiful. – Dave Segal

Released by Obscure & Terrible Records in 2022.

“Whenever I finish listening to this hazy phantom of an album, I come to a strange place at the end of a waking dream. Diavoleria’s music is a mystery. In some ways, it barely exists; a haunted memory of imagined places colored with dark ethereality and intangible beauty. Yet I am drawn to it like a dying moth finding the world’s last light in the form of this powerful, glowing aural mist. Forever Your Salesgirl (one of my favorite album titles of 2022, FYI) is inquisitive through minor chord drones and electronic levity, pulling back the veil on the definition of airiness. These songs are fleeting, but together they land like an anvil on cracked glass. Diavoleria shatters us into pieces before blowing the dust into the magic hour. Incredible.” – Brad Rose, Foxy Digitalis