JOLANDA MOLETTA
Sonic and Visual Spells
Jolanda Moletta’s artistic practice is a radical and spiritual journey through sound art, ritual, and symbolic archaeology of the feminine. A single voice, multiplied, to give form to the unseen.
Night Caves is a rolling dreamscape. Touching on the aesthetic previously mastered by Julianna Barwick, while thematically there’s a deep resonance of the past, from a listener’s point of view it’s an open-ended concern. Really, it can be whatever you want it to be, and such as the scope of these recordings, Moletta makes the mind drift off to beautiful places.
Sun 13
Jolanda Moletta is an Italian artist creating Sonic and Visual Spells, ritualistic compositions of voice and imagery that act as portals for emotional transformation and magic. Her work weaves together sound, ancestral memory, and visual symbolism to create immersive experiences that transcend genre and language, inviting listeners into altered states of feeling and perception.
Sonic and Visual Spells is the name she gives to her music and art: each piece a spell cast through voice and image, a way of making magic. Her work draws on archetypes, symbolism, and the elemental power of the human voice as a bridge between the visible and invisible.
Her latest album Night Caves (Whitelabrecs, 2025) is a transformative exploration of ancestry, nature, and the unconscious. Recorded in ancient sea and mountain caves across Italy, the album blends field recordings and vocal improvisation into immersive soundscapes. Caves become symbols of sanctuary and self-discovery, where Moletta confronted her own shadow and unearthed creative renewal. The album’s artwork, featuring cave photos and black-and-white self-portraits, mirrors this journey between darkness and light, outer and inner worlds.
In 2023, she debuted Sacred Space, a ritual performance exploring the relationship between the sacred and the feminine through four archetypes: Shaman, Sibyl, Mystic, and Witch. Each figure is embodied through voice and the four elements of nature, channeling ancient, forgotten memories of women's spiritual connection with the divine and the earth. The performance offers a meditative, transformative experience where the audience is invited to resonate with the invisible.
Previously, Moletta released Nine Spells (Ambientologist, 2022), a vocal-only debut album and multimedia project dedicated to nine of her female ancestors. Comprising nine ambient compositions released on successive Full Moons, the project includes hand-cut collages, videos, and limited-edition artworks. Each piece emerged from ancestral stories—like her great-grandmother, a wartime herbalist; or her great aunt, the first woman to earn a literature degree in Turin, translating memory into sound and visual form. Though meant to heal the past, Moletta found herself empowered by these women’s strength, channelling it into each spell. Nine Spells was featured on Bandcamp Daily, Spotify editorial playlists (Ambiente, Best of Ambient 2022, Ethereal Vocals, EQUAL Ambient), and aired on KEXP, NTS, Soho Radio, Byte FM, and Balamii. It was reviewed in Rockerilla, Gonzo Magazine, and more. Moletta performed the project live at Le Guess Who? Festival (Netherlands, 2022).
Jolanda also co-created Suspended Between Worlds (Longform Editions, 2023), a vocal-only collaboration with Karen Vogt released on the Australian label Longform Editions. The piece extends her exploration of the voice as a raw, intuitive instrument, capable of shaping space, summoning emotion, and forging connection beyond language.
Their collaboration continued with Sea-Swallowed Wands (Quiet Details, June 2025). This album dives into themes of water, dissolution, and rebirth—blending their voices into a ritual of immersion and transformation, where breath and tone become tides, and sound becomes spell work.
Having fronted the dream-pop duo She Owl for over a decade, Jolanda Moletta now forges a deeply personal path through voice-led experimental music and visual ritual.
Night Caves is a rolling dreamscape. Touching on the aesthetic previously mastered by Julianna Barwick, while thematically there’s a deep resonance of the past, from a listener’s point of view it’s an open-ended concern. Really, it can be whatever you want it to be, and such as the scope of these recordings, Moletta makes the mind drift off to beautiful places. Sun 13
Vocal-based ambient music is a very particular niche, one that houses some of the genre’s greatest vibes and achievements. It takes outstanding courage and a steadfast dedication to this aesthetic choice to venture out into these waters, and only the finest voices who take the plunge will rise to the surface. Everything is Noise
Moletta channels disparate energies into solemn vocal loops that leave listeners contemplating loneliness and abandonment while surrounded by multitudes. Intimate reelections echo through Moletta"s mesmerizing vocals. Foxy Digitalis
With a lunar pull, her voice laps and ebbs like the tide, creating towering spaces between notes Eilled with higher register lines and deep, lower register drones. Fans of artists like Julianna Barwick or Juana Molina will fall for the spectral depth of Jolanda Moletta! Tome to the Weather Machine
A lyrical a cappella composition, free from the hindrance of man-made instrumentation and tribal word emerges from the dynamic well of human existence to flow strong and fragile, piercing and numbing, hot and cold into a breathtaking choir of evocative tones, rising and falling in agony and ecstasy of high and low frequencies to balance cathartically into an organic droning harmony of pure breath and life energy! Whitelight-Whiteheat
The fusion aspect usually adds more depth and pleasing diversity and when it's a voice as lovely as Moletta's, unanchored by instrumentation, and with her wordless vocal dexterity invoking the spirits of her female ancestry, then I'm all ears. The Slow Music Movement
