• ARTIST: Nico Paulo
• TITLE: Interval_o
• CAT#: FMG107
• FORMAT: Vinyl, CD, Digital
• RELEASE DATE: March 21, 2025

There are moments in a life that are made of pure flux, all metamorphosis. But because of the nature of these timespans, artists typically speak from a place of being as opposed to becoming; there is the private experiment in its messiness and curiosity, and then the public artwork in its apparent solid state. Writer Lorrie Moore calls these moments, this being inside the thing and lacking the hindsight of structured narrative, “unsayable life.” We are rarely witness to them because they resist easy marketing. But to spend time with Nico Paulo, who never seems to stop singing, humming, and seeking melody is to find grounding beauty and sustainability in the becoming. It’s a special thing, to cultivate these intervals: they’re often the places where we’re finally able to find the present.

Aptly titled Interval_o—the ‘o’ nods to Paulo’s Portuguese heritage—the St. John’s, Newfoundland-based songwriter’s brief collection of ambient meditations and stream-of-life fragments celebrates a transformational period.

“The purpose of it was to represent what I was experiencing, too,” Paulo says. “I was feeling like I had run out of things to say, but I still want to sing to people. I was wondering, ‘Is there a way of doing that? Can I still keep people company with words and sound and not have to tell a full story?’”

Joshua Van Tassel produced, engineered, and mixed the record, while also playing percussion, electronics, and ondea at his own Dream Date Studio on Nova Scotia’s south shore—the kind of environment, full of loved ones (including Paulo’s partner Adam Hogan on acoustic guitar and Kyle Cunjak on acoustic bass), that provides a safe and generative harbour in which to shift.

While uneasiness is a natural reaction to the feeling of being in a state of being-without-state, Paulo sounds, throughout Interval_o, as though she has surrendered to the process. The glowing opening piece “memory 1: invitation” welcomes listeners to be there with her; water and waves seem to cradle bodies and minds in the beginning of their changes. Over warm, repeating guitar chords, Paulo sings a simple and moving prayer of healing on “memory 2: grow something.” The layered harmony of looped vocals on “memory 3: in company” reminds that one never goes through transformation in a vacuum and sets the mood for a bloom of rhythm on “memory 4” move like a flame,” where Paulo shifts joyfully into the revelry of dance—an artform that resists arrival. And finally, on “memory 5: two ends,” written with partner Adam Hogan, she expresses over delicate acoustic guitar that feeling of falling in love together, opening oneself up to the understanding that forever is changing as you’re about to be forever changed.

While plenty has changed in the wake of Paulo’s critically acclaimed 2023 self-titled debut, Interval_o’s cover reveals an especially major development in her life. As the EP was announced, Paulo was preparing to become a mother. Although the songs were sculpted before she knew she was pregnant—through experimentation doing live music during yoga classes in St. John’s—they were recorded shortly after she found out, which has re-shaped her understanding of them.

“If there's anything that feels sort of like magic, it’s that there was some sort of anticipation or preparation that I was trying to get to while I was writing in that phase,” Paulo says. “Not just the exercise of it, practicing something mindful and meditative, and taking care of my body physically—but it feels like I was preparing in some way for something bigger.”

Interval_o builds a sonic space for listeners to embrace their own metamorphoses, and to sing and dance all the way through them.