Potto presents

Velvet Woolf

Songs about Virginia Woolf and the many people in her life. Written for the hour when the house goes quiet and someone is still at the desk.

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A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 1929

The songs

One life, full of other people.

Velvet Woolf is about Virginia Woolf and the many people who moved through her life. Each song picks up one of them, or one of her own pages, and gives it a voice. Two of those songs are below.

Paper, Pen and Ink: a woman writes with a fountain pen by candlelight, golden handwriting lifting off the page and drifting across the dark room
Track

Paper, Pen and Ink

Lyrics by Virginia Woolf

The words are Woolf's own, and Potto lets them lead. In the artwork the handwriting comes up off the page like steam off a cup, and the writer looks away from her desk as if someone has just spoken her name from the next room.

It is the quiet one. It sounds like a pen that does not stop until the candle does.

By Potto  /  Words by Virginia Woolf  /  Watch on YouTube

Woolf's Sister: a song for Vanessa. Painted portraits of two sisters in a golden garden full of bees, one in black, one in a paint-stained smock
Track

Woolf's Sister

Paint Me Daylight, Honeybee

A song for Vanessa. She was the one who painted the rooms they lived in, who kept the lamps lit, and who got called a sister before she got called anything else. This song uses her name first.

Where the other track is ink and candle, this one is honey and midday: bees in the bell flowers, a woman in a paint-stained coat holding her sister's shoulders and laughing at her.

A song for Vanessa  /  By Potto

Literature to music

Literature, diaries, and the songs they hide.

This is how Potto works. Take a novel, a letter or a page from a diary, read it slowly, and listen for the song that was already in the sentences. Then write that one down.

Start with the video. It is the quickest way to understand why a record about Virginia Woolf sounds the way it does.

Visit the channel

Video thumbnail: Literature to Music! Potto in a moonlit garden with glowing music notes, a quill and floating books

From the video

The door is open. Go out into the garden.

The video for Paint Me Daylight, Honeybee follows the sisters out of the house and into the bell flowers, with a streak of gold light trailing off the older one's skirt. Hand-painted walls on both sides of the doorway. Nobody looks back.

Animated still: two women seen from behind step through an open wooden door into a sunlit garden of lilac bell flowers, a ribbon of golden light trailing from one skirt
Paint Me Daylight, Honeybee. Watch on YouTube
Poster for Paint Me Daylight, Honeybee: a woman in a pale gown in a moonlit rose garden, the Velvet Woolf cover in a gold frame beside her
The poster

About Potto

Historical writers, rebuilt as electronic music.

Potto is the musical project of Victoria Stephen.

Blending Celtic, ethereal orchestration, and progressive trance house with refined British vocals, Potto transforms historical literary figures into intimate, emotionally resonant electronic music.

Listen

Two records. Play them late.

Tip: the button in the corner turns the whole site from night to daylight, same as the song.