Sign up for arts and letters and free exclusive all kinds of everything, free marketing spam and then some (emails are few and far between though)
My new album Stífluhringurinn is out on Carrier Records since June 26th 2024:
Some reviews include:
“This is very beautiful music, sitting with poise and purpose, bending meter, pitch, intonation and tempo without actually demanding that much from its listeners. It is a very easy world to fall into, and a rich one in which to spend time.” -Johny Lamb for The Quietus (also Album of the Week and in the same outlet the album was selected as 26th of the 100 best of the year thus far).
“Irreducible and magical” -Steve Smith for Night after Night
“… you have to put aside preconceptions and immerse yourself in a sound world containing music like no other” -Robert Hugill for Planet Hugill
“It’s a living, mercurial work in which the independent forces compete or coexist to create a gestalt form that exists in the listener’s mind, ephemeral but indelible.” -Ben Harper for Boring Like a Drill
See also interview on Rúv English and review in Norwegian on Salt Peanuts.
L.A. artist Ravi Jackson made this video to Skref from Landvættirnar fjórar and we did a conversation about it that appeared in The foam we removed from the office.
This is a new video by Sam T. Rees for a movement from Landvættirnar fjórar album
Landvættirnar fjórar is out on Carrier Records on October 28th 2022. It’s been mentioned thus far in The Quietus, Bandcamp Daily – Best Experimental, Bandcamp Daily – Best Contemporary Classical, Sound Projector, Planet Hugill, David Presents, Lost in a Sea of Sound, Cookylamoo, A closer listen, Salt Peanuts, Percorsi Musicali, and Foxy Digitalis where aforementioned video was premiered.
A video from a concert in Mengi Reykjavík in 2021:
Further Skorpma releases:
Skorpma I-IV is similar to Horpma but not quite. Released in December 2020:
“. . . The result is a deeply affecting, supremely unsettling sea bed of electronic rumblings, mallets pounding and flutes whistling in a time signature outside the reach of us mortals. It’s a beautiful type of cacophony that is difficult to shake.” -Ryan Hall in TOME to the Weather Machine
“The listening experience feels like being welcomed into an eccentric, remote village where residents have freely mashed together ancient traditions and newly invented customs to devise their own rustic utopia.” –Nick Storring on sinfónía in the latest musicworks magazine.
“This is music like no-other, anarchic and experimental, free yet controlled, humorous but entirely serious, it treats the rules of Western classical music with a freedom and a seriousness that arise out of oral and folk traditions filtered through an idiosyncratic modernism. Do try it.” Planet Hugill on Sinfónía
Skartamannafélagið is a collection of electronic pieces from 2017-2018. I wrapped them up in Videopool in Winnipeg Manitoba, Canada. It kind of takes up where my record Ölterta left off.
It was reviewed by Ed Pinsent for the Sound Projector and amongst other things he had the following to say about it: ” . . .Every piece on Skartamannafelagid is a triumph of this deeply integrated way of composing; layers pulling in different directions, astonishingly novel textures and sounds. We have something that appears to effortlessly bypass many conventions of form, melody and rhythm. . . “
I recently released the second half of the full cycle of my four seasons. Vorlag/Sumarlag or Spring song / Summer Song came out this summer.
“A mesmerising set; absolutely gorgeous music.”
Ed Pinsent for the Sound Projector January 12, 2020.
The earlier part Haustlag/Vetrarlag or Fall Song / Winter Song came out in 2017. All of them were written in the season they are named after and include enviromental sounds from each. This was done in 2015-2016 starting in fall and ending in summer.
A bandcamp who goes by the name Kaleidoscopeman had the following to say:
“Interesting composition for microtonal baroque flute from this Icelandic composer… very atmospheric and psychedelic ! Favorite track: Haustlag“
My Opera Einvaldsóður now on double CD
| “Here there was a performance of an opera of Wagnerian length, width and depth […] these were tidings and they rarely get any bigger in the world of opera in Iceland.” Atli Ingólfsson in Þræðir 2018. |
“The opening of the work was breathtaking, Heiða subdivided into four discrete personalities, shifting rapidly between them. Multiple ideas, behaviours and identities impinged upon, collided with and interrupted each other continuously, articulated by Heiða in an unhinged way […] As Heiða softened into silence, Mengi was left filled with the sound of an electronic chorus of her siren-like familiars; emanating from unseen speakers, it was a beautiful and stunning resolution.” Simon Cummings in 5against4
A collection of live recordings, free or for a donation.
The Whale Choir project from 2018, Marina Rees did the concept and the video, I wrote music based on her whale samples. The final result is all vocal. A choir led by María Sól Ingólfsdóttir.
Some orchestral recordings on Soundcloud. Sporgýla performed by the BBC SSO in 2014 and Grafgata performed by the Iceland Symphony in Tectonics Festival in 2013. Both were performed under the auspicies of Ilan Volkov.
The 3rd studio album of my group Fersteinn
My 2017 record La noche oscura del alma on Tonestrukt Records, L.A.