Angels in the Sand is the second album from Berlin-based artist ava*. Told through swaths of ambience that reference ava*’s own childhood spent on the shoreline, Angels in the Sand poses the ocean as something metaphysical and elemental, the solid ground of the shore rooted in reality while the waves and endless abyss beneath them represent memories and the allure of nostalgia.

Floating in the depths of memories provides a sense of weightlessness, their currents blanketing and comforting but also overpowering and suffocating. Memories are all we have to cling onto, but they can’t be changed. The longer you spend underwater, the more you uncover, and the more it closes in on you. The ocean’s tides are cyclical, but unpredictable: you know you’ll return to its undulating patterns, but it’s unclear who you’ll be when you emerge. Its a sacrifice to go in, but you innocently fall into a belief that heremust lay the answer.

Angels in the Sand is a project about loss. It’s about spending too much time underwater, too much time in reflection, too much time in your childhood, where benign symbols like the beach or the gardenia tree planted outside of your bedroom window become tainted by trauma, their glow of purity tarnished as the picture becomes clearer and clearer. It’s teary eyes in the water, where childlike melodies still play on repeat, the echoes of your voice as a little girl barely audible through the crash of the water.

Angels in the sand is a deeply personal record written, recorded, and mixed by ava* during intense periods of self-isolation, with little to no influence or reference, the writing process itself a silent, lived-in wave of reflection."