Aliya Ultan

Cellist and composer Aliya Ultan announces Looks Far Woman, a new solo album out June 26 on Kou Records, recorded, mixed, and produced by Randall Dunn (Sunn O))), Jóhann Jóhannsson). The album takes its name from a guiding figure in Aliya's personal mythology — a seer who moves between worlds carrying the medicine of patience, prophecy, and transmutation — drawn in part from Jamie Sams' The Thirteen Original Clan Mothers.

Structured as a six-part song cycle — Wind Song, Road Song, Mountain Song, Sky Song, Seed Song, and Heart Song — the album unfolds as a trance-inducing passage through elemental states and embodied listening. Ultan approaches the cello as a voice capable of inhabiting multiple registers at once: orchestral and raw, devotional and restless. The pieces function less as discrete compositions than as threshold spaces, where rhythm, texture, and spectral harmonies gradually reorganize themselves.

Looks Far Woman was recorded during a period of depletion after years of touring, teaching, and sustaining the demands of professional musical life. Rather than resisting this state, the sessions embraced exhaustion as a point of access. "I called-in before our first session asking to postpone before realizing this was exactly the state I needed to be in to access what some might call the hypnogenic state — a transitional stage found between wakefulness and sleep where worlds intersect," Aliya recalls. The story of Looks Far Woman became her guide. "I channeled the power of restfulness and patience. I was going there too, to locate pieces of myself that were missing."

Recorded with Dunn in a studio environment that inspires deep spiritual trajectories, the album unfolds as a continuous ritual rather than a conventional set of songs. Sounds appear, dissolve, and return in altered forms, encouraging the listener to release linear expectation. The album's visual world continues Kou's commitment to artist-driven collaborations. The cover features an original hand drawing by Caroline Harrison, while Aliya's portrait on the reverse was created by science-fiction illustrator Noirmatic, pairing earthly mythic imagery with an interplanetary psychedelic visual language. Across its arc, Looks Far Woman offers sound as a form of repair. As Aliya describes the work: "It is an ongoing process that requires one to drop the ego and travel without knowing your destination."