Nordic Affect: He(a)r
Sono Luminus
Fourteen years on from its 2005 founding, Icelandic ensemble Nordic Affect has established itself as a creative force unlike any other. That's due in part to its unusual instrumentation but even more to the forward-thinking vision of its members, Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir (violin), Guðrún Hrund Harðardóttir (viola), Hanna Loftsdóttir (cello), and Guðrún Óskarsdóttir (harpsichord). A prime example of that sensibility is He(a)r, the group's third Sono Luminus release and a fine follow-up to 2017's Raindamage. It's not so much that the instrumentation is unusual but more that the harpsichord helps distance the group from the standard string quartet; further to that, Nordic Affect stands out for the fact that these period instruments are used in the service of consistently adventurous contemporary material.
The hour-long He(a)r is distinguished by a number of things, first the fact that all seven of the world premiere recordings were written for the group by female composers: Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Maria Huld Markan Sigfusdottir, Mirjam Tally, Hildur Guðnadottir, and, finally, Nordic Affect artistic director Stefánsdóttir. What's most interesting, however, is that as credible as all the works are, it's the latter's title track that makes the most powerful impact. Not only does the piece impress for being a provocative soundscape comprised of spoken word passages, it's also threaded throughout the album with snippets of the ten-minute total interspersed between each track. The choice proves to have been a brilliant one, since the intermittent appearance of the material lends shape and coherence to the recording; further to that, had it been presented in a single, uninterrupted form, its impact might have been diluted. Absorbing it in small units is tantamount to sampling exquisite desserts a little bit at a time with breaks in between.
A so-called “meditation on embodiment, acoustics, and ecology,” He(a)r as a title references the album's female composer dimension but also emphasizes what the phenomenon of hearing entails and the importance of attending closely to sounds as one experiences them in each moment. It is, in short, a paean to active listening. Four female voices recite short texts by writers such as Pauline Oliveros, R. Murray Schafer, David Suzuki, and Bruce Chatwin, with Oliveros's “How can you not listen if your ears never close?” and Schafer's “The subject we are concerned with is sound...” representative of the general spirit of the writings. Voices speak, whisper, and overlap, the elements sometimes heard separate from one another and at other times woven into multilayered collages, and adding to the compositional design, fragmented voice effects often appear as added texture.
The third in Sigfusdottir's trilogy of compositions created for Nordic Affect, Spirals calls upon the quartet's sensitive side in a nuanced rendering of plaintive string phrases and mournful atmospherics. Though the title might imply animation, the piece's carefully calibrated activity level tends to the meditative and low-key. Thorvaldsdottir's aptly titled Reflections perpetuates that querulous tone by gently overlapping sustained monotone expressions; her Impressions, on the other hand, conjures an eerie soundworld through its incorporation of spidery strums (sourced, I'm guessing, from the harpsichord's insides) and synthesizer-like figures. That aforementioned tension between the period character of the instrumentation and the boldness of the material the group performs is never more apparent than during Tally's Warm life at the foot of the iceberg, wherein bright harpsichord patterns accent raw string gestures whose flutter and groan alternately evokes swooping bird formations and insect swarms. Ultimately, all of the composers' contributions speak highly on behalf of Nordic Affect as curators and performers, yet it's Stefánsdóttir's—the least conventionally musical of the seven presented, interestingly enough—that you might find yourself remembering most.January 2019