Anna Thorvaldsdottir's music embodies a world of barren beauty and vast landscapes. Her textures are layered with stillness and rippling undercurrents; her timbres encompass the luminous fragility of Sciarrino and the earthiness of Oliveros, while her intuitive rhythmic writing traces contours that are somehow both jagged and organic. These qualities are tangible on her album Aerial, first released by Deutsche Gramophone in 2014, and rereleased in 2022 by Sono Luminus, whose commitment to achieving high-fidelity recordings through microphone placement and acoustics brings out a raw immediacy in the seven pieces featured in this most recent compilation.
The album begins with Into – Second Self. We open with the soft, bright friction of wire brushes against percussion instruments. From the intimacy of such close contact between hands and instrumental body, a long roll emerges like an immense metal curtain opening. The landscape revealed is icy and nocturnal, night creatures calling to each other to warn of an impending storm. We never witness the storm itself, but we hear it gather in the gusts of wind and swathes of long, overlapping brass notes like leaves and branches tensing, readying themselves for the force of the gale. Here, the players’ breaths are almost imperceptible, the sound smooth and consistent despite the rugged timbre and dissonant harmony, the strange union of control and wildness birthing an uncanny, dreamlike world. Rising fifths in the horn, long associated in the musical canon with hunting calls, conjure mythic beings, riding on horseback over barren plains, calling to each other in strange, low cries. With this, the percussion rhythms, latent until now, gather urgency, like the hooves of vast horses against ground dry enough to ring out with such insistent pounding. From the hunters’ voices, the opening sound resurfaces. Combined with the spaciousness captured in this recording, the cyclical structure of the work murmurs, prophetically, that the story to which these visions gesture is constantly unfolding.
Ró seamlessly emerges from the end of Into – Second Self, opening with a thin mist of white noise. A note repeats, bell-like in the murky low register of the piano. Caught swiftly by the middle pedal, the fundamental gives way to a sheen of rich harmonics, from which other pitches gradually blossom. As instruments enter on a unison, then break away in microtones, fifths and fleeting slices of melody, there is a sense that the ensemble is tuning, their noodling playful yet meticulous, the sensitive phrasing maintained evenly as it passes between players. In this opening section, the high winds and low piano jut out of the texture at times, disrupting the otherwise consistent blend. There is something organic about the way the harmony grows denser, the timbre morphing like sonic clay. The following section also grows from individual piano notes, and builds on the noise-based opening: from air through the bodies of flutes and clarinets, the strings emerge, reeding like a melodica or accordion, blending so consistently that they sound like a single instrument. The stasis recalls one of Oliveros’ solo improvisations, the melodic fragment passed between the winds like air moving through bellows, the balance revealing a sonic intimacy like that arising from Deep Listening. The noise layer and eventually the melodic content fall away, leaving only the ancient-sounding, sustained resonance of the strings. At last, we are left with an octave unison, liquid-smooth, hanging as if in mid-air. After the top note fades, the final cut-off is sudden yet stops short of jarring the ears, its seamless quality akin to gradual shifts in organ registration.
Staying with the idea of air and floating, the next piece is the sprawling yet transparent orchestral work Aeriality. Interweaving scalic motifs in the wind glide over the stillness of a long pedal. The sustained note grounds us, yet in the feathery wind melodies and absence of pulse there is a sense of weightlessness, of rising through air. The winds fall away, replaced by the metallic glissandi of alien birds passing swiftly overhead. Subtle shifts in orchestration, seamlessly navigated by Ilan Volkov and the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra, convey a sense of changing air pressure. Emerging from a long, low rumble as if the sky were holding back the growl of thunder, a grandiose, almost Mahlerian melody offers a glimpse of vast mountain landscapes seen with wonder from above. The move from grainy dissonance in the preceding section to this brief Romantic passage is expertly navigated by the orchestra, leaving the listener wondering: ‘How did we get here?’ while simultaneously making the transition feel seamless and natural. In a mostly static dynamic world, the musicians make the rare swells exhilarating, the stillness between them brimming with anticipation in this live recording. The piece ends with another extended pedal note, during which some of the breaths in the wind occur in quick succession at the top and bottom of the orchestra, slightly dampening the impact when, several times, the players suddenly break away from their shared note, reducing the impact of the sudden rhythmic outbursts which disrupt the stasis, creating gashes in the stillness like chinks in an expanse of sky, Yet we seem to be grounded again, the gentle rearticulations in the low brass rooting us in earth. But at last, all pitched material cuts back. White noise emerges like a long exhalation by a breeze, and we leave the clamour of earth and float in still, silent air.
After the vastness of Aeriality, we suddenly find ourselves in a much more intimate space in the duo Tactility. The piece opens with a long sheen of grainy, airy sound, intermittently broken through by low timpani strokes like distant thunder: a vast sonic wilderness, windswept and laden with sand. A long, low pedal enters, held beneath wind-like gusts that grow over the pitch, eventually burying and melting it away. The wind persists, and we move to a more industrial soundscape: a harp brings out its percussive qualities, from high pedal glissandi to rhythmic beating on the wood, the material at once fragmented and mechanical. The same instrument becomes fleetingly elfin, but maintains the metallic timbres of the industrial section through more continuous, dance-like and modally beguiling ripples. The final section gestures back to the worlds which opened on to it: underpinning everything is a long pedal like the one in the third section, but slightly higher, its presence more defined, the almost electronic consistency of its timbre bringing to mind one of Laurie Spiegel's works for analogue synthesiser. Whereas in Aeriality the long pedal at the end was disrupted by much louder interjections, the knots in this sound are softer, subtle rearticulations of the note, like bell strokes, the high whistling of the wilderness, mechanical sounds of industry, and even more fleetingly than before, low, metallic harp notes that recall the elfin section. Like so much of Thorvaldsdottir's work, the textures and sense of space in Tactility are visceral and embodied, the images they conjure vivid yet difficult to pin down. The deep focus of the players renders tangible the stillness of the work, amplifying the enigmatic and timeless dimension that emerges from the union of Tactility's seemingly disparate worlds.
In Trajectories, we return to a more expansive space. The piece opens with a build-up of sonic strata emerging from white noise. The soundworld is rumbling, its gradual build-up and vastness emphasised by the smoothness of the articulation and murky pedalling in the piano, combined with sensitive blending bringing to mind the deep colours and spaciousness of Luther Adams’ Become Ocean. But Thorvaldsdottir's seascape is more foreboding, and immerses us in the calls of birds, the bugles of departing ships, the creaking of fishing rods and the snapping of coral. There is a sense of moving deeper and deeper below the surface, drawn down by falling melodic figures, new colours emerging as we plunge, the movement of tides and currents encircling us. The ‘trajectories’ of the work are themselves like slow waves: layers gather and movement grows, like the blossoming shades of colour in surging water. A tolling pedal low in the piano register becomes bells, more easily recognisable here than those at the end of Tactility: a vast cathedral on the distant shore, much fainter than Debussy's towering, drowned cathedral, yet bringing it to mind in its flooding submergence. The overall arc of the piece, like the smaller ‘trajectories’ within it, is structured like a wave: from the noise of the opening to the rich and watery sonic clouds at the centre, we hear the bells break through and, tolling, fade into silence or far distance.
At just over half the duration of Trajectories, the next piece feels fragile and ephemeral in comparison. Shades of Silence journeys from grainy harmonies in both whistling and murky string registers, the focus and commitment of the players tangible as we might expect from a realisation of Lachenmann's precisely crafted sounds. In this fragile soundscape, fragments of a Bach harpsichord suite are scattered. By the end, the Bach emerges, now more continuous and exposed. The title could encompass the space within sounds as much as the breaths between them and their musical heritages, their union and trajectory affording the piece a sense of liminality, of hanging delicately on a thread between ages.
In Aura, a new addition to Aerial in this rerelease, mellow tones glow, fifths and unisons floating halo-like around the listener through the circular positioning of the ensemble. Long, rippling gestures intermittently wrinkle the surface, their energy restrained, as if these are only the phantoms of waves broken over vast distances. The piece is somehow both eerie and reverential, as if hearing the hum of constellations from the bottom of a well. The glow of the music blossoms from the blending of the tuned percussion, moulded into a single, mesmerising sound across both the bowed and rippling facets of the work. Like the opening piece on the album, Aura has a cyclical structure: the last note seems ready to release another wave, but instead hangs there, like several of the other endings on this album, leaving the work fragile in its wholeness.
Aerial is tightly woven and seamlessly evolving, the seven pieces sharing themes of nature, myth, stratified ages and mingled worlds. Opening and closing with cyclical works, the album as a whole is infused with an air of the eternal: as though from the opening of the vast curtain at the beginning of Into – Second Self and the epic scenes emerging from it, we leave the theatre at the end of Aura with the drama still unfolding forever just beyond the listener's gaze.
