Bára Gísladóttir: SILVA
Sono Luminus
Imagine a double bassist, the sonorities of her instrument expanded upon through the application of real-time processing (MAX/Live, specifically), attempting to create some sonic approximation of a Black Hole, and the result might sound something very much like SILVA. A nearly hour-long solo performance by Copenhagen-based Bára Gísladóttir, the recording is an uncompromising plunge into electroacoustic brutalism that pulls into its orbit elements of noise, drone, electronica, and heavy metal. While her own characterization of it as “a mass of noise” isn't off-base, SILVA isn't quite as vicious or violent as that might suggest—though it's hardly genteel either.
The recipient of multiple awards, Gísladóttir studied composition at the Iceland Academy of the Arts, Conservatorio di Musica "Giuseppe Verdi,” and at the Royal Danish Academy of Music and has seen her music performed by numerous ensembles and orchestras, among them Ensemble InterContemporain, Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Nordic Affect, Siggi String Quartet, and TAK Ensemble. SILVA is the latest in a series of releases by a composer and double bassist who performs solo, with her longtime collaborator Skúli Sverrisson, and in Elja Ensemble.
While many of her compositional works are calm and meditative, SILVA finds her granting expression to a darker, wilder, and untamed side. It's certainly unlike much of Sono Luminus's catalogue, which generally focuses on through-composed contemporary classical material by pianists, chamber and choral groups, and symphony orchestras. SILVA's appearance on the label isn't a total left-turn, however, given the many releases by Icelandic artists the label has issued in recent years. Gísladóttir's belongs with that group, even if it's an undeniable outlier.
The work opens with heavy bowing, the double bass instantly identifiable as the sound generator, but soon enough the material morphs into something more abstract and, frankly, monstrous. Electronic treatments engulf the instrument with rippling percolations until the mass begins to feel like the beginnings of a volcanic eruption. Churning rhythms lend the performance a woozy, almost stupefied quality custom-made to induce grogginess and entrancement. Undergirded by a throbbing bass, the music continues as a grinding howl, a raw, keening, and blustery behemoth that seethes and convulses for fifty-seven minutes.
Melody is downplayed, the emphasis instead on texture, dynamics, and unfiltered expression. Rising to the surface of the whole, the bowing resembles the strangulated wail of an animal, even sometimes a whale's cry; the distortion-heavy sound mass heaving alongside it, on the other hand, grinds like an overdriven engine belching black smoke. Things take a particularly caustic turn at the thirty-seven-minute mark, but the pulsations aren't, in truth, all that much different from those roaring through other parts of the performance. It's probably safe to say nothing else quite like SILVA exists at the Sono Luminus store or in Gísladóttir's discography, for that matter. Even if it's a one-off, there's no denying its power.April 2023