New Music From Anna Thorvaldsdottir

Like Laibach, Sunn O))), and Sibelius collaborating on a funeral mass

Welcome, new readers! Before we begin, I want to mention that I published a book last year. Ugly Beauty: Jazz in the 21st Century is a collection of profiles of significant present-day jazz artists. It was named one of Esquire magazine’s Best Music Books of the Year, and received really nice reviews in DownBeat, JazzTimes (when that meant something), Mojo and lots of other places. You can get it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Bookshop.

Anna Thorvaldsdottir (photo: Anna Maggy)

I’m kind of astonished to realize I’ve been listening to composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s music for almost a decade. I first heard her work in 2015, when she released two albums within 12 months. Aerial, which appeared in November 2014, gathered six compositions for groups of various sizes, from duos to full orchestra, while In the Light of Air, released in August 2015, contained two of her compositions—the lengthy, four-part title suite, and “Transitions”—performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble. I reviewed them together, concluding:

Thorvaldsdottir’s music is likely not what the average person thinks of when they hear the phrase “classical music.” However, its atmosphere and tonalities are likely to appeal quite strongly to fans of forbidding music of any genre (dark ambient, industrial, noise, post-metal). With a quality sound system and proper lighting design, the music on Aerial could turn a concert hall into a deeply unsettling place, one filled with listeners under 60. On the other hand, In the Light of Air, while it retains the emotional intensity of the shorter pieces, adds enough brightness and positivity to demonstrate the vastness of Thorvaldsdottir’s compositional imagination and sonic universe.

In 2018, she put out AEQUA, a collection of chamber pieces and one large-scale work, “Aequilibria,” which requires twelve musicians. All the players were part of the ICE. I reviewed that one too, and was struck most of all by her use of low frequencies: one piece, “Sequences,” which comes after “Aequilibria,” is written for bass flute, bass clarinet, baritone saxophone and contrabassoon, while another, “Fields,” features bass clarinet, piano, electric guitar, cello, double bass and percussion. There, I concluded:

The production and mixing on AEQUA is frankly breathtaking. The instruments, so often required to go far beyond their traditional roles, rattle and boom, scrape and clatter; the music is swathed in reverb, but always for dramatic, not romantic, effect; and the use of space, be it distance between instruments or the overall immersive quality of each grouping, is mesmerizing. Thorvaldsdottir’s use of sound puts her in the room with composers as disparate, yet linked, as Roscoe Mitchell, Tom Waits, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Autechre, without taking ideas from any of them, or from anyone else that I can identify, though that’s probably due to my own ignorance of modern composition.

Between 2017 and 2021, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra released three compilations of works by composers from their country, and the first and second volumes — 2017’s Recurrence and 2019’s Concurrence — included works by Thorvaldsdottir. When the trilogy concluded with 2021’s Occurrence, I reviewed all three volumes together, calling out her 13-minute Concurrence-opening piece “Metacosmos,”

which starts with low groans, like we’re inside a whale humming to itself, but ominous signs are on the horizon early. Big bass outbursts arrive without warning, like someone slapped you in the side of the head, and the violins hover like vultures. There’s a moment about one-third of the way through the piece where almost everything falls away except for some soft sweeping sounds, like a factory at midnight. That’s followed by a pastoral interlude, but it doesn’t last long. The bass slaps return, and low strings and tympani create an ominous, war-movie rumble and boom as violins and flutes slide back and forth like soldiers crawling through mud, hoping not to be seen. Eventually, though, the drums fall away, leaving a cloud of strings like smoke drifting through a bombed-out forest.

Also in 2021, she put out the string quartet Enigma. Just 28 minutes long, it was nonetheless released as a stand-alone CD. String quartets’ movements often carry tempo instructions in their titles, but this one exists as a kind of cloud of momentary sense impressions, so there’s no point. It’s full of drones like clouds of bees, percussive plucking and tapping, slowly swelling chords, whispering/scrubbing sounds like angry ghosts, and any time there’s a little flurry of melody there’s always some other sound (or a post-production effect moving the music around within the stereo field) to subvert it. It’s nice, but ultimately a minor work, because Thorvaldsdottir’s music requires a broader canvas — whether instrumental or durational — to achieve its full effect.

This year, she’s got two major releases out — some of her best pieces ever, both thanks to the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. They’ve put together another compilation of music from Icelandic composers, a sequel to the …rence series called Atmospheriques Vol. I, and it opens with Thorvaldsdottir’s “Catamorphosis,” which a number of orchestras in the US, UK and Europe have been performing since it premiered, as a streaming event with no live audience, via the Berlin Philharmonic in January 2021. It’s a 21-minute piece in a single movement that includes many of her sonic trademarks (extraordinarily low, rumbling figures, ominous piano, horror-movie strings), but there are passages with an achingly spiritual, even liturgical feel that may remind some listeners of Henryk Goreçki or even Arvo Pärt. There’s a string flourish about nine minutes in that’s as beautiful and heart-stirring as the score to a Pixar movie.

The ISO has also just released a CD featuring two more Thorvaldsdottir compositions, the 21-minute, single-movement “Archora” and the three-movement, 41-minute “Aiōn.” “Archora” begins with one of those huge throbbing low chords like you’d hear in a movie trailer, at which point the strings begin stirring like small forest animals unnerved by the sound. We hear sharp, percussive strikes, like the string players are whacking their instruments with their bows, and then big surges, as the massive low tones return again and again and tympani begin to thunder. Eventually the piece comes to a somewhat calming and peaceful resolution, as though you’ve waited out a storm that wasn’t as heavy as you thought it would be, but it’s a surprisingly intense journey to get there.

“Aiōn” is less threatening — it’s quite pastorally beautiful for much of its running time — but it has plenty of ominous moments, too. About three and a half minutes into the third movement, aptly titled “Entropia,” a low buzzing tone appears and repeats again and again over massive tympani, like a warning. The strings are briefly silent, then come back in like storm winds shaking the trees in an already dark forest. Things become more and more chaotic, building to a crescendo that could easily be terrifying in a well amplified concert hall, particularly when the horns begin to howl like distressed whales. In its final minutes, the piece becomes almost funereal, the strings slowly expanding to fill the entire world with sorrow. It’s at moments like this, when Thorvaldsdottir shows you that she can write in a conventional, instantly comprehensible mode, that the glories of her more work’s more abstract effects become clear. Her music has an extraordinary, dark power, at times pitiless in its cold-eyed disregard for the listener’s terror — real “fuck your feelings” stuff — but when she softens up for just a moment, often when she’s bringing a piece in for a landing, that’s when you fall at her feet.

Mostly because of my own ignorance, I don’t know of anyone else making music like this right now. (If you do, I’d love to hear about them.) It has an extraordinary, overwhelming effect on me, but I think that’s because I come to it from several directions at once: I can hear connections to Gustav Mahler and Jean Sibelius, but it also draws me in by reminding me of Sunn O)))’s “Alice,” Charles Mingus’s Let My Children Hear Music, Laibach’s Krst Pod Triglavom/Baptism, and Dimmu Borgir’s Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia. If those are your aesthetic sweet spots, too, then the dark forest of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s music awaits you. Get in there.

A few things before I go:

• I wrote a guide to Chicago blues for Shfl that quotes Luigi Rossolo’s 1913 essay The Art of Noise, because of course I did. But the important part is that it includes 20 reviews of amazing albums by Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Buddy Guy, Magic Sam, Hound Dog Taylor, Jimmy Reed and others, so check it out.

• I’ve got two fantastic releases on Burning Ambulance Music in the works for later this year, so in the meantime, check out our existing catalog and pick up some CDs, won’t you?

That’s all for now. See you next week!