Sophie Auster vocals, acoustic guitar · Marie Davy piano and vocals
Sophie Auster: “My most intimate album, yet so full of shared feelings”
In the age of AI algorithms, packaged emotions and thirty-second attention spans, Sophie Auster is an artist whose music offers listeners another world, one in which shared feelings take center stage. And while the album’s songs tell stories about her own sorrows and joys, they are all emotions that humans have experienced at some point in their lives.
In this sense, Auster explains that the album’s title, Milk for Ulcers, came about after a dinner table conversation about old-fashioned remedies for various ailments: “While milk can momentarily relieve the pain of an ulcer, it can actually make it worse.”
The irony is obvious, but what to do with wounds and how to heal them is an unsolved enigma that Auster refuses to answer with clichés. Milk for Ulcers, she says, “is about closing open wounds, even if some of the treatments are only temporary.”
Sophie’s mother, Siri Husdvedt, once said that Spain was “a warm and loving country”. She and Paul Auster, both winners of the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, forged a close relationship with Spain through its readers and its most illustrious writers (“Isn’t it the best book ever written?” said Paul Auster about Don Quijote) and now that bond continues with their daughter Sophie, who has wanted Spain to be the first country she visits to present the songs from her latest album.
Door opening: 30 minutes before the concert.
