Ola Szmidt

A part of nearly every day in my post-retirement life is what I call my musical "deep dive."  I browse and follow links through Spotify, Bandcamp, and YouTube to try and hear new music I never heard before - ideally, I try to find new music I never even conceived existed before. My holy grail is to find a track on Spotify with a single-digit number of plays. Results have been mixed, but the process is always interesting.

Today's discovery is Polish singer-songwriter, musician, classically trained flautist, and producer Ola Szmidt.  Compared to my single-digit number-of-plays goal, Szmidt is wildly popular - C Tactile Afferent has a whopping 19,737 number of plays on Spotify.  Now based in York, England, Szmidt says the track was "Inspired by touch, skin hunger, the nervous system and my admiration of C Tactile Afferent nerve fibres which respond to slowly moving, gentle touch, like a caress. Music can affect these receptors and if it resonates with us, it feels like it is tickling and gives us shivers. Touch and music are so therapeutic."

"What happens when we are deprived of touch?", she asks. "Skin hunger. It is a condition caused by absence of touch from others. In this pandemic a lot of people are suffering from it and I send my love and light to everyone." I would love to hear a collaboration between Ola Szmidt and like-minded Norwegian musician Jenny Hval.

C Tactile Afferent is from Szmidt's EP3.  You can buy EP3 and her previous EPs on Szmidt's Bandcamp page, or you can stream her on Spotify and boost her number of plays.