I posted about Iceland’s Hildur Gudnadottir a few months back. My comments at the time:
It’s over 11 minutes, but feel like it goes by in a flash. The overlay of that droning sound on top of these thick cello movements is breathtaking. It evokes the deep winter of Iceland, a single streetlight casting long shadows in the snow… She’s got an album called Without Sinking that came out a couple months ago which I haven’t picked up yet, but am really looking forward to.
I’ve now listened to Without Sinking quite a bit, and while no single track comes close to matching “Iridescence” the entire work together is both simple and stunning.
Opening track “Elevation” is perfectly titled – it conjures a sense of moving breathlessly across a wide expanse of snow-covered ridges and valleys. It surrounds you and lifts you up high until the world down below is barely a dream.
This is an album that places you among the clouds – sometimes dark, heavy, full of rain and thunder, ready to muffle your thoughts and wipe away all memory – sometimes bright and weightless, shining like crystals in the light of a noon sun – always pulsing with some kind of self-contained life. You can see their beauty and maybe catch a glimpse of their place in the grander scheme, but they remain forever distant. Even as Gudnadottir’s cello takes you gliding through them, they fall to the side, forever beyond your grasp. Their seeming solidity revealed to be an illusion wrought by your own imagination.
Without Sinking is dark, gloomy even, but it is not sad. The somber tone does not imply a sense of futility or purposelessness – it simply reflects the deep incongruity of the sensational world.
Perhaps the best example of this can be found in “Ascent” – the middle point of the record, where you begin to sense that this album is an invitation to blur the lines between wakefulness and sleep. If you let yourself be drawn in, you see that the difference between consciousness and dreams is not that one is real and the other illusion. They are both illusion, but the dream is perhaps more liberating because it knows itself to be unreal. Freed from the restrictions of causality and clarity, you recognize something deeper–not truth or meaning, but the freedom that comes from within rather than without. “Ascent” is not an ascent into the heavens. After all, the whole album already exists among the high reaches of the clouds. It’s about the movement within which accepts the world of clouds as unique and incommensurable – that ceases trying to understand or know it, and simply experiences it.
With that move complete you’re free to hear the second half of the album, the dream world made real. Not to dip too far into cliche, but the real genius of the second album isn’t found in the notes she plays but in the spaces between the notes. Not just the temporal gaps, but also the spatial ones. The cello bends and bows and its notes occupy your field of vision but always, somewhere on the edges, you see the clouds that lie beyond…stretching out in undulating waves and impossibly complex patterns.
If there’s a flaw in this record, it’s in the payoff. The last two tracks “Into Warmer Air” and “Unveiled” aren’t bad, but they also break up the mood which had been so perfectly established. Where the first eight tracks guide you so effortlessly that you feel no sense of pressure or even movement, “Into Warmer Air” pulses with far more insistence. It’s a beautiful song – to be sure – but even that small reminder of materiality disturbs the flow. On the opposite side, “Unveiled” is a fine closer, just not to this album. It is the sound of a terrestrial darkness, of caves and caverns, of cool rocks and deep lakes.