Northumbria: Vinland
Cryo Chamber
Vinland brings Northumbria's trilogy about the Norse discovery of Canada to an elegant, often meditative, and sometimes peaceful close. Cavernous rumblings do surface in a few places on the ten-track set, but it would be misleading to characterize the material as turbulent or tumultuous. Vinland is the sound of a journey successfully completed and a destination safely reached. Having left the sea behind, the focus now shifts to exploration to take in whatever sights and sounds this new land has to offer.
Wielding guitar and bass (presumably effects-laden) and recording their improvised compositions live, Canadian soundscaping duo Jim Field and Dorian Williamson show themselves to be world-class ambient practitioners on the release. True to Cryo Chamber form, a paragraph of text offers an interpretative spur to the musical design, and consequently associated images of unmapped panoramas where winds whisper and rivers murmur emerge within the listener as the settings unfold. An occasional field recording, such as the noise of a crackling campfire in “The Wìndjigò,” intensifies the atmospheric potency of the material, and with darkness falling and creature vocalizations punctuating the air, trepidation sets in, the explorers bracing themselves for the possibility of attack.
Fear, however, is hardly the only emotion evoked. The waves of shimmer surging through “Where the Water Meets the Sky,” for instance, impart a narcotizing effect consistent with the hallucinatory daze those aboard ship might have experienced after seeing nothing from the deck for weeks, perhaps months, but sea and sky. The crushing, molten guitar slabs flooding through “New Lands, New Gods,” on the other hand, convey foreboding in suggesting the discombobulating anxiety those same explorers might have felt when first setting foot ashore and gazing upon an untamed array of rocks, trees, and mountains. Not that a prolonged stay on terra firma wouldn't introduce its own share of challenges: the eerie gloom rising from “Overwintering” hints that months spent trying to survive freezing temperatures has the capacity to generate any number of mental disfigurations. Such anxiety dissipates during the two slow-burning meditations “Still Valley” settings, where we imagine the explorers transfixed by the breathtaking splendour of the landscape.
Field and Williamson hew to their guitar-bass aesthetic throughout, though solo violin appears during the brooding title track to lend the piece a differentiating character. Many of these smoldering tracks are in the nine- to twelve-minute range and thus lend themselves to the kind of deep immersion music of this kind most benefits from, and, as with all Northumbria recordings, Vinland is best played at a high volume in order for one to be fully enveloped by its black magic.December 2018