In recent years i’ve been increasingly impressed at the amount of radical musical invention coming out of Iceland. Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir, Hekla Magnúsdóttir, Áki Ásgeirsson, Þóranna Björnsdóttir, Bára Gísladóttir, Berglind María Tómasdóttir, Davíð Brynjar Franzson, Lilja María Ásmundsdóttir, Ingibjörg Ýr Skarphéðinsdóttir, Sóley Stefánsdóttir – these are just some of the composers whose music has astounded and amazed me. And to that illustrious list i must now add another: Bergþóra Kristbergsdóttir.
Her debut album, Drýpur, is enormously intense, to the extent that i experienced something like three or four false starts: pressing play, but realising within a minute or so that i just wasn’t ready to listen to what was coming. This is not remotely light music: it’s dark and it’s heavy – and often, it’s incredible.
The opening ‘Intro’ is practically a misnomer, no mere upbeat to what’s to follow; at nearly seven minutes it’s actually the longest track on the album, and it gives a very direct, cogent demonstration of what lies in store. Clarinet, strings and electronics intermingle in such a way that stability is regularly implied, either as a kind of ‘default’ state or an underlying presence – most strongly here through notions of dronal perfect fifths – though consistently undermined and rendered moot. Everything, everywhere moves. Notes slide, multiple strands form, and within three minutes the texture is so complicated that pitch and noise are impossible to separate, the ear baffled by sheer convolution. Yet even here individual pitches momentarily assert themselves, projecting out. Adding to the stability illusion is the track’s later ascension to a plateau, gaining radiance and harmonic certainty, ending with gentle high notes. Was this always the destination? Kristbergsdóttir’s ‘Intro’ is perfectly-judged, its beautiful mix of tangible notes and chords, and tangled web of oblique sounds, creating an environment that sits outside easy definitions of character, seemingly organised and spontaneous at the same time, teetering at the limits of stability.
What follows in the first half both continues and hugely expands these ideas. ‘Armæða’ [a word indicating fatigue and exhaustion] continues at altitude, introducing a collection of clarinet strands moving around each other, across multiple registers. It takes on a much more direct shape, settling into and around a slightly forlorn falling four-chord sequence, somewhat folk-like but askew. Even here, though, pitches prove erratic; the texture significantly thins, and focus is lost as the strings slip slide in a way that suggests both keening and birdsong. The network of their calls grows huge, takes over, and we’re back in a place of noise again – until they’re abruptly silenced. What remains is pure enigma: soft, floating ambiguity, like a lingering trace of something previously rubbed out.
The startling reference to Lovecraft in third track ‘Shoggoth‘ makes it clear that we’re moving beyond the relative delicacy of the first two tracks. It continues from that palimpsest as something strange, messy, slow and low, juddering as if movement were difficult and painful. Whereupon an enormous bass entity materialises fully formed, grinding from the abyss. Brief moments of repose provide glimpses of something possibly poignant, but its monstrous dark growls colour everything. Yet whether the bass is impelling everything is another matter; this all seems to be a single sonic idea, complex and dense, finding a strange half clarity in improbable chords in its midst. Things become polarised, the wonderfully deep stentorian phrases answered by a violin spiralling high above, and each pole becomes reinforced, a sludge in the depths, a chorus in the heights. This astonishing sound-mass ends up, similar to ‘Armæða’, at a single tone as the intense afterglow cools.
The conclusion of the first half of Drýpur is unexpected. ‘Elísabetarstofa’ [Elisabeth’s room] diffuses the residual heat, channelling it into hymn-like music. The ensemble moves together – so messily, but that only makes it more beautiful. It’s very striking after what went before, in terms of both character and duration. Perhaps the enormity of ‘Shoggoth’ purged something? Certainly the epilogue, ‘Værð’ [gentleness, tranquillity], arrives at the most coherent music so far, a quiet communal tune, tilted, echoed, refracted, intimate.
The second half of Drýpur opens in similar territory. ‘Innvortis’ [on the inside; internal] again has clarinets moving and pausing together, focussed and nocturnal, a continuation of sorts from ‘Værð’ but quickly coming apart. They’re coloured by buzzy soft clashes (both acoustic and electronic) that don’t remotely undermine the music but actively reinforce it. This is melody we’re hearing, yet its horizontal line is seemingly subject to a considerable vertical force weighing down on it. The fuzz and buzz only make the effort feel more concerted, conveying so much more enormity than impressions might suggest. It’s extraordinary.
It feeds into ‘Veinan’ [the lament], yet while that title suggests we’re now going to get the anguished release rendered impossible in ‘Innvortis’, Kristbergsdóttir instead sets up a soundworld where bowed metallic shapes suggest abstract voices wailing in darkness; hard impacts clatter a blank pulse, partly formed from feathery pitch accumulations that sputter as quickly as they speak; rumble is shaped into a proto-drum. This weird, incredible avant-band marks time like a funeral cortege, crowned by a brute force, foghorn-like song, its contour less like that of melody than muscle. Its sudden appearance instantly triggers the strings to explode into a cloud of ice shards, semi suspended; once the song ends, those shards reform into a softly shining coda, as if aligned by high harmonics impressed by the foghorn into the air.
Like in ‘Shoggoth, ‘Draumur um stjörnuhrap’ [dream of a shooting star] also introduces a cosmic element into Drýpur. It’s a rare place of stillness, drone, rumble, vague notes, nothing really moving. The texture grows in density, and while there appears to be something tangibly melodic, it’s deep in the music’s core, small and fragile within a strange web of tendrils, in what becomes like a stasis. Eventually the tension is broken and the mote of clarinet melody sings in a quiet, shuddering aftermath.
That tiny seed, and the attitude and atmosphere of ‘Veinan’, are combined in ‘Samofinn’ [woven together]. Clarinet notes lightly vibrate against each other, while an immense deep resonance tolls like an alien bell, devoid of overtones, its reverberation rippling through the texture. Again the instruments move together, slowly and carefully, dazed, transfixed, trance-like, deeply solemn and profound. Infinitesimally inching forward, the clarinet notes become modulated by an ever growing fug of saturating reverberance. It’s like trying to resolve the details of a fireball from the outside of the shockwave.
As with the first, so the second half of Drýpur concludes with another progression toward clarity – of a kind. Clarinets again predominate in ‘Hún sekkur’ [she sinks], close in the foreground – seemingly right in front of us – projecting sad, sagging strands, their combined breath accumulating into a hissing noise layer. The strings take over, shaping the idea into a wavering repetition, gaining more and more voices, becoming a queasy, squeezebox music, the chorus large but their details increasingly nebulous, exacerbated by bands of electronic shimmer. Here again the sense that what’s tangible is obfuscated by both the quantity of voices – like multiple attempts to articulate simultaneously – and the voices’ innate instability.
Drýpur ends with an ‘Outro’ that snaps everything into sharp focus. Yet for all its chamber music surety, the effort remains, the ensemble’s simple phrase – possibly melancholic, just as easily neutral (or numbed) – repeating round and round, looping not progressing. And for all its strength, the music abruptly sinks down partway through, coming to a halt, limping chords charting a final, unfathomable progression.
The fact that this album comes from an Icelandic composer shouldn’t by this stage come as a surprise. Drýpur is simply one of the most stunning, genuinely breathtaking albums i’ve heard in recent years. The result of a (thankfully successful) crowdfunding campaign, it was released by Smekkleysa in January on vinyl and digital.
