It’s a sign of the trust that i have in Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir’s music that, when she sent me her new album Skinweeper a few months back, i dropped everything and just pressed play. No prep, no note-reading, i didn’t even look at the track titles; i just wanted to listen, immediately. And it’s a sign of both the uniqueness and depth of impression that her music makes that, partway through the first piece, i realised i’d heard it before.
It was, in fact, my baptism of fire where Snæbjörnsdóttir’s music is concerned. Up in the Arctic Circle, in the Norwegian city of Bodø at the 2019 Nordic Music Days, i was exposed to Areolae Undant, where an ensemble sat in the midst of, and seemingly in part responded to the, a collection of lights. It was like music being made anew, reconfigured, recalibrated, reborn. Unforgettable.
While this new recording of Areolae Undant, which opens Skinweeper, obviously lacks the visual element, it more than makes up for it in pure sonic viscerality. In theory, we’re in the presence of a cor anglais, contrabass clarinet, two cellos and percussion. In practice, it’s as if all those instruments had been broken down into their component parts to be reformed as a new, multifaceted chimera. And it breathes: projecting deep, sustained tones, the music initially dictated by these long exhalations. They feel difficult, strenuous – the familiar labours of the newborn – not passively breathed but actively pushed out into the air. Over time, they surge, swell, becoming increasingly individual and varied, filled, coloured and coated with constantly-shifting emphases of pitch and timbre.
Implications of the absent lights can be felt in sporadic pauses that occur, seemingly in response to an unspoken command. Necessary moments of stillness, they complement the earlier inbreaths and in turn only seem to fuel the work’s progression. It becomes not merely intense, but profoundly sensual, the product of timbres so achingly tactile it’s as if their nerve-endings were starkly exposed, the product of sounds that suggest moans of ecstasy. Eventually the ear becomes completely unable to latch onto anything other than the continuity – which is not to say the surface, but the totality of register, timbre and behaviour, the entire sonic shape-shifting, which by now feels familiar.
Areolae Undant is stunningly all-encompassing, at once primordial, pre-music, yet also futuristic, post-music, and utmost radical, ultra-music. It’s not a piece that could continue indefinitely, it’s simply too intense and electrified for that. Yet rather than simply end, there’s the distinct impression that the two works that follow don’t merely come in its wake but resonate within and beyond its warm afterglow.
That seems fitting for a piece titled Gleaning, Still, with its implication of gathering what remains, alongside the suggestion of both continuity and suspension. Reduced to just a duo, clarinet and percussion, the music sits in adjacent territory, only now instead of being pushed out, it’s stroked and rubbed into vibrating existence, even more tactile than before. Each halting stroke is simultaneously intimate, unpredictable, harsh and tender. Again there’s that sense of nerve-endings, where the lightest touches teeter between pleasure and pain. What’s mesmerising about it is its suggestion of brief attempts to hold in check something borderline uncontrollable. A pure shimmering tone makes things more stable, while the clarinet tilts things the other way, leading to unbridled howls of enraptured overload.
The Spilling Jars adds harp into the mix. That title, with its implications of overflow, is interesting in light of what’s gone before. A sense of continuity persists; pure tones and friction-induced sonic instability return. The tone has shifted though, and the soundworld feels more vague and elusive. It’s a complex, uncomfortable threesome, and in this context it speaks like aftermath. As such, it’s somewhat disarming in its sideways step into greater abstraction. Fragmentary, less cohesive, the sounds – spilt? – struggle to connect. Cymbals squeal, the clarinet flails, alternately frantic and hesitant, pitch attenuated to fragile drones, like fall-back positions from which to keeping pushing forward. It’s hard not to hear an air of desperation to it all; in its live iteration Areolae Undant experiences periods where the lights go out, and one imagines the protagonists here playing in a more figurative but no less total darkness.
Of course, all three of these works are individual, and their respective intimations of connection speak on their own terms. Yet it’s interesting how, brought together on Skinweeper, these suggestions extend outwards, no longer only between players but now between pieces. The result is an immersive, highly-charged experience that vividly illustrates why Snæbjörnsdóttir is among the Iceland’s most dauntless composers. Her next album can’t come quickly enough.
Released by Smekkleysa, Skinweeper is available on vinyl and digital.
