Soundtracking the Anthropocene: Before it Becomes Memory
- Særa Fiøra
- May 19
- 2 min read
The Anthropocene is a geological epoch defined by human impact. It’s an era of rising seas, mass extinction, and existential uncertainty. Naturally, it is also an era of profound creative response. For vocalist and songwriter Særa Fiøra, music becomes more than expression; it becomes an important method of participation in a crisis that usually feels too big to influence.
Fiøra’s work is a weaving of ethereal vocals, cinematic layering, and spoken word to build immersive soundscapes that hold not only the beauty of the natural world, but also the deep psychic rift that fuels it. Her performances are sonic explorations of ecological grief—part worship, part lament, part mirror—inviting listeners to sit with the often inexpressible experience of loss, collapse, and complicity.
“I can’t stop thinking about how much is still here,” Fiøra says. “For so many species and natural places, it is not too late. But it will be, very soon.”
Her earlier songs, such as Lost Cathedral and The Wind Calls You Home from her debut album Unfurl, planted the seeds of this vision. But her upcoming album Violet Wing goes further—offering an immersive sonic and narrative experience that reckons with extinction, memory, and the longing to preserve what we still have.
Where Unfurl reflected a personal emergence, Violet Wing expands into a mythic and planetary scope. The songs are part thought experiment, part homage, part elegy—imagining not only what is being lost, but what could still be saved.
“It’s not a punishing experience,” she explains. “It’s not a guilt trip or an admonishment. It’s an eyes-and-heart-open turning toward what is unfolding within and around us. It’s the question posed in my song ‘Lost Cathedral’—could it be different?”
Violet Wing explores the treasures of the Earth alongside the haunting What If? that lives in all who care for it. The album becomes a form of witness—a poetic record of this fragile moment. Alongside her music, Fiøra is completing a speculative novel titled The Last Fern, which echoes and expands the emotional terrain of Violet Wing. The story follows a young woman awakening in a dreamlike, post-collapse world with no memory of Earth—only a pouch of seeds and a growing sense that something sacred has been lost. Blending ecological allegory with mythic time travel and poetic narrative, the book serves as a literary companion to her music, exploring the fragility of memory, and the question of whether anything—planet, culture, or soul—can be restored once it has been erased. “My ultimate longing is for all this splendor not to become memory and myth. I want the creatures and landscapes alongside us to stay alive, and I want to create a way for people to be present with their grief, wonder, and gratitude for this miraculous planet. This is a moment of witnessing and warning across generations, across landscapes. I see my work as a record of this moment—terrible but still beautiful—so nothing is lost in silence.”
