released September 16, 2022

Enter.
It is as if there is an invitation. We are being invited into—what?
Enter.
A cloud.
No.
Raw natural sound. A deep bass tone—this is the invitation; this is making the invitation—and a climbing array of harmonics, bulging or ringing. A sound like the wind. A sound like a distant engine. A sound like a great bell some while after it has been struck.
No. Or not only.
A choir. A great choir, but their words have been erased, and all the particularities of their voices, to leave only the surge of singing.
No.
A space.
No.
Sadness.
Go on.
I sense a great sadness. I sense a great melancholy, a weight of sadness. I hear this weight, this sadness, this weight of sadness, and I wonder —
Go on.
I see a heart breaking, the simple shape, a heart, and it is breaking, pulling itself apart, or being pulled apart, so that it is about to split, right at its navel, at its divide, because this is where the tension is being felt most keenly, at its navel, at the heart of the heart, you might say, as it is pulling itself apart, being pulled apart, but so slowly, so intensely slowly, that I cannot see any change as I go on watching, only feel the tension, right at that point, the heart of the heart, the tension that I feel also as this great sadness, pulling the heart apart, or else this sadness is not in the tension but in the heart itself as it feels the tension and does not know if —
Go on.
No. Or not only.
Go on.
A space. As I said. A space like the world, with ground and sky, and birds in that sky.
No.
An interior space, then. As that of a temple.
No.
Something at the same time warm and ignorant of temperature.
No.
An interior space, I say, but nothing architectural, nothing constructed, because this is the space within a living body—not the organs and so forth, but that other space within us, the hollow that we carry, and do not know what it is.
No. Or… No.
You do not have to enter. You are already there.


Review from 5against4
Bára Gísladóttir & Skúli Sverrisson – Live from the Spirit Store written by 5:4 October 28, 2022

Over the last few years i’ve been more and more deeply impressed by the music of Icelandic composer and performer Bára Gísladóttir. First contact was at the Dark Music Days in 2020, when i saw her in action with Skúli Sverrisson, forming a complex double bass / electric bass soundworld that caught me off guard and took some time to process. That experience was nourished by subsequent encounters with Gísladóttir’s solo album HĪBER (one of my best albums of 2020) and, the following year, her double album with Sverrisson Caeli (one of my best albums of 2021) which took what i’d witnessed in Reykjavík and expanded it into a massive 2-hour immersion. Which brings us to 2022, and to the nicely-timed coincidence of two new releases featuring Gísladóttir as both composer and performer.

The first is another of her collaborations with Skúli Sverrisson, recorded earlier this year at the Louth Contemporary Music Festival. The album comprises two sets lasting around 26 and 11 minutes respectively, and the first thing to say is that they’re markedly different in tone from both what i heard at the Dark Music Days as well as the majority of Caeli. There’s a gentleness that pervades these two performances, such that even though they don’t shy away from substantial surges and even dense walls of sound, these are matched by a restraint that indicates a motivation more concerned with articulating than with overwhelming. It’s not just about restraint, though; throughout both of these sets there’s an emphasis on pitch (and, to an extent, harmony) that, over time, sounds increasingly significant. This is in part due to the way these elements persist through what amount to some pretty intense vicissitudes of noise and sonic dirt.

The opening of ‘Set 2’ locates the possibility of pure tones in the midst of a dark cloud, though their purity is soon rendered grainy and fuzzy. It establishes a paradigm of liminal clarity in which a subsequent dronal passage acts to stabilise everything. The centre of ‘Set 2’ is a lengthy oasis, traces of movement and ideas rendered soft-edged, floating in a semi-suspended environment. For the longest time – and despite the presence of further drones – there doesn’t appear to be any effort or possibility to resolve either the pitch tension or the nebulosity of that extended middle sequence; yet somehow, something akin to a ‘tonic’ emerges a couple of minutes before the end. It’s a moment that’s silently catalytic, triggering the music to turn increasingly intimate as it finally dies away. Throughout ‘Set 2’, the duo are almost impossible to separate, melding together into a single entity, whereas in ‘Set 1’ they’re more divergent. Furthermore, being over twice as long as ‘Set 2’, it’s also much more dramatically extensive. The tension resulting from a similar (un)clarity of pitch has a parallel in the way Gísladóttir and Sverrisson oscillate the structure between passages where melodic or harmonic elements are heard in the midst of varying amounts of obfuscation, and passages of more dronal focus, which act almost like breathers, relaxing things before pushing forward into another period of tension. i spoke of harmony, though there’s something almost illusory about the way this aspect manifests in ‘Set 1’.

Sverrisson’s slow-moving basslines often give the impression of actual or implied chord progressions, which sometimes (but not always) are confirmed by higher register material. There’s even a sense, as the piece progresses, that it’s part of a complex passacaglia – with a bassline that’s occasionally audible – cycling around the same harmonic space. The divergence is most apparent around halfway through, when the music almost becomes akin to a strange two-part invention, though it’s important to stress that there’s always an apparent sympathy between the players. We might call it ‘individuated agreement’, not exactly following each other the whole time yet not going their own way either. Repeatedly they return to plateaux where everything is stable and united, respites from the heightened sequences in between when Gísladóttir’s double bass obsesses over squally, argent filigree while Sverrisson’s bass shapes large growling swells that threaten to consume everything. Some of the most mesmerising passages fall between these poles of pressure and release when the duo are at their most vague, at one point reducing to something like indistinct distorted bells which materialise and vanish as if by magic.​