Browse by Label: BEDROOM COMMUNITY (ICELAND)

Artist:	MUHLY, NICO
Title:	Speaks Volumes
Label:	BEDROOM COMMUNITY (ICELAND)
Format:	CD
Price:	$12.50
Catalog #:	HVALUR 001CD

2007 release; new midline pricing. The first release on the Bedroom Community label features seven exquisite works of chamber music for small ensembles with electronics. This debut album by composer Nico Muhly was created with producer Valgeir Sigurðsson (Björk, Bonnie "Prince" Billy) in Reykjavik, Iceland and in New York, Muhly's hometown. Since having graduated from the Juilliard School for composition in 2004, 25 year-old Muhly has been causing significant ripples in modern music circles with a variety of projects. He has collaborated closely with artists as diverse as Antony (from Antony and the Johnsons who guests on Speaks Volumes) and Philip Glass, with whom he's had a long-standing relationship working on numerous stage works & film scores. Muhly played on Björk's album Medúlla where he met Sigurðsson and the idea of working together on an album was soon discussed. He then worked with Björk on the score for conceptual artist Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9 film. In 2004, his small ensemble work "By All Means" was played at the Royal Academy of Music, London and his evensong canticles were sung at Clare and Girton colleges, Cambridge which were broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 in 2005. Speaks Volumes doesn't sound like most classical records. It is not an idealized version of live musical performance or a substitute for the authentic live experience. It is not intended to conform to the nineteenth-century experience of classical music. Speaks Volumes was approached from a different direction. Sigurðsson's recording and production doesn't sit back and let the music sweep the listener away emotionally; it leans forward in exacting scrutiny and urges the listener to pay attention. Several of the track titles on the album such as "It Goes Without Saying," "Keep in Touch," "Honest Music" and "Clear Music" describe an attempt to communicate. For instance, "Clear Music" could describe the transparency of the piece's musical texture, but it could also refer to the insistency with which its musical ideas are put forward. It attempts to "make itself clear." The flattest surface, the merest gesture, even the deepest silence Speaks Volumes.

Artist:	FROST, BEN
Title:	Theory Of Machines
Label:	BEDROOM COMMUNITY (ICELAND)
Format:	CD
Price:	$12.50
Catalog #:	HVALUR 002CD

2007 release; new midline pricing. This is Reykjavik-based composer/producer Ben Frost's first release for the Icelandic Bedroom Community label. From the ominous darkness and intensity of its opening moments, one might expect a death metal album to break out in an instant, but Theory Of Machines is an album whose design is as symphonic as it is confrontational -- the tempo doesn't pick up, no hooks or vocals arrive, and when the drums finally kick in, they're as fragmented and corroded as they could possibly be and still resemble a groove. On Theory Of Machines, Ben Frost exploits every extreme of pitch, volume and timbre, the changes in this music sometimes seem as gradual as changes in the weather -- and sometimes as violent. As the music changes it changes only in texture, color and intensity so that the sense is not of something being created, altered or even developed, but of something already present being slowly illuminated. At 26, he has already released such critically-lauded works as 2003's guitar exploration LP, Steel Wound on the Room40 Label, which Pitchfork Media marked as "...an exemplary ambient experience," and the harrowing, self-titled 2005 opus School of Emotional Engineering, which Db Magazine called "...an atmospheric masterpiece."

Artist:	SIGURDSSON, VALGEIR
Title:	Ekvílibríum
Label:	BEDROOM COMMUNITY (ICELAND)
Format:	CD
Price:	$12.50
Catalog #:	HVALUR 003CD

2007 release; new midline pricing. Valgeir Sigurðsson is a renowned Icelandic producer and engineer as well as the head of the Bedroom Community label, and this is his first solo record. Sigurðsson's sound, his distinctive artistic voice, has been filtering through the cracks of "mainstream" music for years: he has had a significant hand in Björk's seminal Vespertine and Medulla albums, the hushed confessions of Bonnie "Prince" Billy's The Letting Go and the cacophonous nursery rhymes of Cocorosie's Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn. The sense of craft, intensity of focus and attention to details in Sigurðsson's work behind the controls is evident on this debut and in the works of those artists Sigurðsson represents on his label. Ekvílibríum includes vocal performances from Bonnie "Prince" Billy, who helps craft one of the highlights of the album, "Kin," where rivers of strings flow around playful music boxes and prepared piano, as well as contributions from Faun Fables' Dawn McCarthy and J. Walker aka Machine Translations. It's an album that blends genres so effortlessly and gracefully that the word "genre" itself becomes obsolete, mixing all the vital elements like a bricklayer mixes concrete. Despite the solidity of Sigurðsson's ideas, there is also a fluidity between the tracks, and even within them. The theme of water trickles through the album, with direct references in titles such as "Evolution of Waters" to the general aesthetic feel of the album; from the dripping percussion of "Equilibrium Is Restored" to the tidal waves of strings engulfing the listener on the effervescent "Before Nine." With Ekvílibríum, Valgeir Sigurðsson has shown that he is equally as talented as a crafter of songs and instigator of a cascade of emotions. Fans of everything from Björk to Brian Eno to Telefon Tel Aviv will find themselves falling in love with the album's lucidity, its beauty and its emotional impact. Having worked on many era-defining releases of the past, Sigurðsson has now created one of his own.

Artist:	SIGURDSSON, VALGEIR
Title:	Ekvílibríum
Label:	BEDROOM COMMUNITY (ICELAND)
Format:	LP
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	HVALUR 003LP

LP version. Valgeir Sigurðsson is a renowned Icelandic producer and engineer as well as the head of the Bedroom Community label, and this is his first solo record. Sigurðsson's sound, his distinctive artistic voice, has been filtering through the cracks of "mainstream" music for years: he has had a significant hand in Björk's seminal Vespertine and Medulla albums, the hushed confessions of Bonnie "Prince" Billy's The Letting Go and the cacophonous nursery rhymes of Cocorosie's Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn. Ekvílibríum includes vocal performances from Bonnie "Prince" Billy, who helps craft one of the highlights of the album, "Kin," where rivers of strings flow around playful music boxes and prepared piano, as well as contributions from Faun Fables' Dawn McCarthy and J. Walker aka Machine Translations. It's an album that blends genres so effortlessly and gracefully that the word "genre" itself becomes obsolete, mixing all the vital elements like a bricklayer mixes concrete. Despite the solidity of Sigurðsson's ideas, there is also a fluidity between the tracks, and even within them. The theme of water trickles through the album, with direct references in titles such as "Evolution of Waters" to the general aesthetic feel of the album; from the dripping percussion of "Equilibrium Is Restored" to the tidal waves of strings engulfing the listener on the effervescent "Before Nine." With Ekvílibríum, Valgeir Sigurðsson has shown that he is equally as talented as a crafter of songs and instigator of a cascade of emotions. Fans of everything from Björk to Brian Eno to Telefon Tel Aviv will find themselves falling in love with the album's lucidity, its beauty and its emotional impact. Having worked on many era-defining releases of the past, Sigurðsson has now created one of his own.

Artist:	AMIDON, SAM
Title:	All Is Well
Label:	BEDROOM COMMUNITY (ICELAND)
Format:	CD
Price:	$12.50
Catalog #:	HVALUR 004CD

2008 release; new midline pricing. Valgeir Sigurðsson's Bedroom Community label welcomes the second release from U.S. newcomer, Sam Amidon. At Sigurðsson's state-of-the-art Greenhouse Studios, Sam was left to concentrate on his intuitive interpretations of age-old folk-songs, a skill on which he proves himself to be a unique talent, drawing simultaneously on his experiences growing up a child of folk musicians in Vermont, and his more recent work in New York with the experimental indie-rock bands Doveman and Stars Like Fleas. From the opening notes of the first track, "Sugar Baby," it's as clear that All Is Well is a different album from his previous offerings, and by the album centerpiece, the wistfully poignant "Saro," it's obvious that this album is very special, indeed. With horns erupting and dissipating around the listener, Amidon's trademark delivery is perfectly offset by the tenderly plucked notes of his six-string. Nico Muhly's orchestration is not the only addition to Amidon's barrel of sounds. A dizzying amalgam of trombone, Eyvind Kang's ghostly viola, and processed percussion convert a children's singing game from the Georgia Sea Islands into the ominous ambiguity of "Little Johnny Brown." The distinctive bass of Ben Frost is evident on the pensive "Fall on My Knees," while subtle layers of electronics add an intrinsically modern aspect to the proceedings. Couple this with Sigurðsson's production wizardry and you'll realize that despite links to the Appalachian folk music of the past, All Is Well is an album that could only exist in the present. One of the unquestionable triumphs of All Is Well is its diversity. From introspective ballads of jealousy such as "Wild Bill Jones" to upbeat barn-dancing ditties such as "Little Satchel," the structure of the album is paramount in making everything work so naturally. Sam leaves the listener with a feeling of resolution parallel to that of a keen reader thumbing the last page of a favorite novel. He sings of death's spindly fingers finding him, a prospect he handles with no trepidation -- for he has Muhly's flourishing string arrangements to give him courage and form a stable bed for his tender lyricisms. In the length of an album, Amidon has struggled through gunfights, paternal tensions, religious guilt and the lonely life of a nomad, but he leaves us with the message that "all is well"; a defining statement that is bound to warm the hearts of even the coldest gun-slinger.

Artist:	FROST, BEN
Title:	By The Throat
Label:	BEDROOM COMMUNITY (ICELAND)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	HVALUR 006CD

This is Reykjavik-based composer/producer Ben Frost's second release for the Icelandic Bedroom Community label. Frost first took the spotlight and smashed it to pieces in 2007 with his breathtaking and critically acclaimed release Theory of Machines, which Boomkat called "the future of electronic music" and The Wire called "simply awesome -- Arvo Pärt as arranged by Trent Reznor." It's impossible to truly classify where he is coming from musically, but it would be safe to say his fans would also have records from Neurosis, Tim Hecker, Sunn O))) and Fennesz in their collection. To simply call him an experimental electronic musician, however, does him no justice whatsoever. Where Theory of Machines came sterilized in fluorescent light, By The Throat is blood red and cloaked in shadow. Produced in Iceland by Ben Frost and Valgeir Sigurðsson (Björk, Coco Rosie, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy), By The Throat features performances by Amiina of Sigur Rós fame, Arcade Fire's Jeremy Gara, Swedish metal outfit Crowpath and composer Nico Muhly. Aside from the purely musical language of harmony and melody -- like Amiina's strings on "Leo Needs A New Pair Of Shoes," there's the level of musique concrète, the weaving of nonmusical sounds into the musical fabric. We hear the snarling of wolves and the groaning of lions in "Killshot," the microscopic clicking and whirring of hunting killer whales in "Through The Roof Of Your Mouth" and the unmistakable sound of a human gasping for breath in "Híbakúsja." Then there's the sheer physical experience, the literally visceral effect of Frost's seismic rhythms and high-pitched shrieks on your body. These extra-harmonic elements are not just effects to punctuate the musical narrative in By The Throat, but are integral, unifying motifs. Borgar Magnason's menacing double bass growls pure bestial noise throughout By The Throat and the brass choirs of "Peter Venkman" are recorded so closely that they almost transform into pure human breath. And just as these voices slide away from "notes" and "harmony" to become concrete sound-images, the meanings of these images rattle around and collide into each other, forming a whole language of gasping and howling, gut-punching bass, and snarling metal. Using this language, Frost tells a story we can't quite articulate, but which we can feel, profoundly and unmistakably.

Artist:	FROST, BEN
Title:	By The Throat
Label:	BEDROOM COMMUNITY (ICELAND)
Format:	LP
Price:	$17.50
Catalog #:	HVALUR 006LP

LP version. This is Reykjavik-based composer/producer Ben Frost's second release for the Icelandic Bedroom Community label. By The Throat is blood red and cloaked in shadow. Produced in Iceland by Ben Frost and Valgeir Sigurðsson (Björk, CocoRosie, Bonnie "Prince" Billy), this album features performances by Amiina of Sigur Rós fame, Arcade Fire's Jeremy Gara, Swedish metal outfit Crowpath and composer Nico Muhly. Aside from the purely musical language of harmony and melody, there's the level of musique concrète, the weaving of nonmusical sounds into the musical fabric. Borgar Magnason's menacing double bass growls pure bestial noise throughout and the brass choirs of "Peter Venkman" are recorded so closely that they almost transform into pure human breath. And just as these voices slide away from "notes" and "harmony" to become concrete sound-images, the meanings of these images rattle around and collide into each other, forming a whole language all its own. With spot varnish lettering on the front and back covers and a full-color insert, the packaging of this LP looks and feels enormously better than actual human social interaction.

Artist:	BJARNASON, DANIEL
Title:	Processions
Label:	BEDROOM COMMUNITY (ICELAND)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	HVALUR 007CD

This is the debut full-length release for Icelandic composer and conductor Daníel Bjarnason for Bedroom Community. "Blurring the line between electronic and chamber music -- a familiar style for the Icelandic Bedroom Community collective -- the constructions of this recording's emotional triggers are wholly unique. In Daníel Bjarnason's Processions, the composer marshals all the technical forces at his disposal to accomplish a musical goal rather than an ideological statement. Daníel Bjarnason is 'the other classical composer' on our label, a throne he now shares with the omnipresent Nico Muhly. Daníel and Nico may both conjure their magic and craft via black dots on manuscript paper and swinging of the arms & upper-body, but their music is as fundamentally different from each other's as it is from that of Ben Frost or Sam Amidon. If anything else connects it -- apart from allowing me to cast my own spell on it -- it is that it is all brand-new; taking nothing as given while being fully informed of the past and the possibilities of now." --Valgeir Sigurðsson, Reykjavík 2009; "Bow To String," composed for multi-tracked cello, was written for Sæunn Þorsteinsdóttir. This is a piece that not only evokes feelings of tension or tenderness, it dares to signal them. The unapologetically, relentlessly direct harmonic progression grounding "Sorrow Conquers Happiness" and the melody singing out in the concluding "Air To Breath" lay themselves bare, inviting the audience into the score by demonstrating an awareness of emotion without crossing over into irony. The violently percussive performance techniques, the moments of ghostly timbre or asynchronous attack, are not there as commentary on the piece's emotional vocabulary, but as an extension thereof. "Processions," Bjarnason's second concerto written for pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, performs a similar balancing act of self-consciousness versus earnest appeal in both its genre and harmonies. True to the archetype of the concerto form, "Processions" begins with an extravagant statement; a statement Bjarnason takes to new heights in his thunderous exposition "In Medias Res." Its subsequent development recalls a traditional Slavic concerto, remarkable for its virtuosic elements and deeply earnest melodies. The propulsive rhythms of the last movement ("Red-Handed"), like the syncopations in "Bow To String," project a certain quasi-primitive energy reminiscent of electronic or rock music. "Skelja," a darker, more introspective score for harp and percussion, in a sense suggests what might remain behind if the comforts of form and more overt forms of expression were somehow extracted from "Bow To String" and "Processions." The dense texture of the electronic cello choir and the massed resources of the orchestra are replaced with the strict economy of a plucked and e-bowed harp. But even here, glimpsed in the harp's obscurity and the percussion's subtle halos of color, the style of the composer, now introverted, persists.

Artist:	SIGURDSSON, VALGEIR
Title:	Draumalandið
Label:	BEDROOM COMMUNITY (ICELAND)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	HVALUR 008CD

Iceland's Valgeir Sigurðsson has made his name as an exponent of musical subtlety. As an engineer and producer, he's often focused on the intimate, the miniature. But this is only one side of his musical capabilities. Draumalandið (trans. "Dreamland"), a documentary about the exploitation of Iceland's natural resources, tells a story about huge things -- the fortunes of a whole nation; the destruction of vast landscapes; and the global economic forces, greater still than any nation, that fuel it all -- and for his soundtrack to the film, Valgeir has brought out a heavier set of tools. His entire roster of Bedroom Community label-mates contributes in some way to the creation of the score: classical composers Nico Muhly and Daníel Bjarnason, industrial wizard Ben Frost, and American folksinger Sam Amidon, along with a host of others, and the small orchestra assembled for the record swells from moments of expansive beauty into massive, surging symphonic force. Its harmonies are anxious, pulsing, driven. Not that this is an album lacking in subtlety. Draumalandið the film takes on the delicate task of unmasking the apparent win/win proposition of Iceland's aluminum smelting boom -- clean energy! New jobs! Economic growth! -- as a false blessing with very real consequences. Likewise, Draumalandið the soundtrack takes global, at times seemingly abstract questions, and offers deeply personal responses. Valgeir's score makes fierce and direct statements of sorrow and indignation, but it also expresses, with a kind of hushed awe, the beauty of landscapes on the brink of devastation, and the seductive shimmer of the illusions that imperil them. Tender, fragmented melodies rise out of uncanny musical textures; in the album's opening track, Sam sings "Grýlukvæði," an Icelandic folktune about a greedy hag come to devour naughty children, just as he would an Appalachian ballad, and in turn, Valgeir reframes it as a sad, sympathetic reprimand to a people (Icelanders, yes, but by extension all of humanity) who would sell their birthright to a rapacious multinational. This is all painted in brushstrokes broad and minute, from a palette of hugely varied shades -- Sam's banjo-playing, Daníel's John Cage-style piano treatments, Ben's halos of distortion -- but somehow, it all fits together as a coherent musical argument. Heard as an accompaniment to the film, the Draumalandið score can disappear into the images and the narrative. Listened to on its own, it rewards close attention: for the subtle interconnections between the movements, for their cumulative emotional force, and simply as a series of meticulously-scored and recorded musical moments, urgent meditations on the natural sublime.

Artist:	AMIDON, SAM
Title:	I See The Sign
Label:	BEDROOM COMMUNITY (ICELAND)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	HVALUR 009CD

This is U.S. singer-songwriter Sam Amidon's second album for the Bedroom Community label -- the follow-up to 2008's highly-acclaimed All Is Well (HVALUR 004CD). The needle-drop fuzz that cues I See The Sign raises the curtain on a world of little theaters, foretelling an aural gut-grip that is fully human and wholly natural. Amidon's intuitive and often radical reworkings of age-old secular ballads, gospel, folk songs, and hymns render familiar characters new through his direction, vision, vocals, banjo, guitar, and stellar contributions from fellow musicians. I See The Sign showcases deft attention to song-craft and collaboration. Where All Is Well foregrounded voice and strings to share tales of human endurance, I See The Sign is a carefully-constructed battle and balance of musical sensibilities surveying the psychological extremes of existence. Contributing to I See The Sign is multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, a long-time collaborator of Amidon's whose musical past includes New York City's improv scene as well as playing bass for Rage Against The Machine, percussion for Tom Waits, and guitar for Laurie Anderson. Offsetting Ismaily's expansive contributions, Nico Muhly's chamber-orchestral arrangements for string, brass, and woodwinds continue the groundbreaking work he began on All Is Well. Renowned singer-songwriter Beth Orton emerges after a music-scene hiatus to lend haunting vocals to four songs. In an environment of struggle, euphony, and polyphony, Valgeir Sigurðsson's expert role as producer grounds this sonic psycho-geography. While atmospheric pressure on "Rain And Snow" builds from the love of trouble and troubled love, "Pretty Fair Damsel" lightens the scene as Amidon's voice and Muhly's keys cast rays of sun through forests of sugar maple to spotlight music for the hopeful and hope-filled. "How Come That Blood" gallops with Ismaily's percussion and Moog bass, accented by string flourishes as pheasants take wing to flee the scene. Through recomposed children's singing game "Way Go, Lily" and Georgia Sea Islands song "You Better Mind," Amidon and Orton pair elegant vocals to play out strains of concern and comfort. Title song "I See The Sign" steps boldly center-stage to depict the dark clouds of Armageddon hovering over wildflowers, myrtle and marsh marigold blooming against a roiling grey sky. By stark contrast, an intimate rendition of R&B musician R. Kelly's "Relief" is the perfect dénouement to draw the album's drama to its finale. With fearless grace and apocalyptic beauty, I See The Sign enacts a technicolor reality, with sound grown in and on the body -- a body costumed in blood-red lichen and moon-silver moss, with the crackle of grit audible beneath boots. An album traversing the emotional gamut, Sam Amidon and his collaborators present I See The Sign as a gift to the listening, sensate body.

Artist:	AMIDON, SAM
Title:	I See The Sign
Label:	BEDROOM COMMUNITY (ICELAND)
Format:	LP
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	HVALUR 009LP

LP version. This is U.S. singer-songwriter Sam Amidon's second album for the Bedroom Community label -- the follow-up to 2008's highly-acclaimed All Is Well (HVALUR 004CD). The needle-drop fuzz that cues I See The Sign raises the curtain on a world of little theaters, foretelling an aural gut-grip that is fully human and wholly natural. Amidon's intuitive and often radical reworkings of age-old secular ballads, gospel, folk songs, and hymns render familiar characters new through his direction, vision, vocals, banjo, guitar, and stellar contributions from fellow musicians. I See The Sign showcases deft attention to song-craft and collaboration. Where All Is Well foregrounded voice and strings to share tales of human endurance, I See The Sign is a carefully-constructed battle and balance of musical sensibilities surveying the psychological extremes of existence. Contributing to I See The Sign is multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, a long-time collaborator of Amidon's whose musical past includes New York City's improv scene as well as playing bass for Rage Against The Machine, percussion for Tom Waits, and guitar for Laurie Anderson. Offsetting Ismaily's expansive contributions, Nico Muhly's chamber-orchestral arrangements for string, brass, and woodwinds continue the groundbreaking work he began on All Is Well. Renowned singer-songwriter Beth Orton emerges after a music-scene hiatus to lend haunting vocals to four songs. In an environment of struggle, euphony, and polyphony, Valgeir Sigurðsson's expert role as producer grounds this sonic psycho-geography. While atmospheric pressure on "Rain And Snow" builds from the love of trouble and troubled love, "Pretty Fair Damsel" lightens the scene as Amidon's voice and Muhly's keys cast rays of sun through forests of sugar maple to spotlight music for the hopeful and hope-filled. "How Come That Blood" gallops with Ismaily's percussion and Moog bass, accented by string flourishes as pheasants take wing to flee the scene. Through recomposed children's singing game "Way Go, Lily" and Georgia Sea Islands song "You Better Mind," Amidon and Orton pair elegant vocals to play out strains of concern and comfort. Title song "I See The Sign" steps boldly center-stage to depict the dark clouds of Armageddon hovering over wildflowers, myrtle and marsh marigold blooming against a roiling grey sky. By stark contrast, an intimate rendition of R&B musician R. Kelly's "Relief" is the perfect dénouement to draw the album's drama to its finale. With fearless grace and apocalyptic beauty, I See The Sign enacts a technicolor reality, with sound grown in and on the body -- a body costumed in blood-red lichen and moon-silver moss, with the crackle of grit audible beneath boots. An album traversing the emotional gamut, Sam Amidon and his collaborators present I See The Sign as a gift to the listening, sensate body.

Artist:	PUZZLE MUTESON
Title:	En Garde
Label:	BEDROOM COMMUNITY (ICELAND)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	HVALUR 011CD

Bedroom Community broadens the scope with En Garde by Puzzle Muteson, a mysterious, intimate record by a fearless songwriter and lyricist from the windswept Isle of Wight. Arranged and produced by collaborators and label mates Nico Muhly and Valgeir Sigurðsson, En Garde is a strange, comforting and alarmingly personal record. Driven, spare lyrics are hoisted high by vocals of steady, sturdy tremble. Each tune swells with plush guitar pluck in a sea of orchestration and electronics. Recorded in the Greenhouse Studios in Iceland, the album collects Puzzle Muteson's odd and beautiful stories about love and horses, rust and polar bears, heartbreak and birds. Puzzle's songs are curious sounds from a troubled heart and his lyrics are urgent and open, striking a note with their vulnerable memories. "I Was Once A Horse" is an unforgettable song about nostalgia. The title track pits Puzzle's longing against waves of dense strings and jagged rhythm, while "Perspex Disguise" sets his naked, translucent vocals against shimmering piano that refracts off epic chords. In "Flamingo Head" he sings; "I left your house. You let me. I left you ugly," buffeted by guitar and distant murmurs. "Not a single thing could take this magical sight. I'll find you still," he sings on "Medusa," the story of a man tracking down a lost love. Like many Bedroom Community recordings, En Garde takes an unexpected and unique voice and elevates it out of any easily discernible pocket. Puzzle Muteson could be "folk" or something completely different -- instead he's an intense stranger from the Isle of Wight -- at once both familiar and unfamiliar. En Garde heralds a haunting and essential new voice, beautiful, earned and yearning.

Artist:	PUZZLE MUTESON
Title:	En Garde
Label:	BEDROOM COMMUNITY (ICELAND)
Format:	LP
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	HVALUR 011LP

LP version. Bedroom Community broadens the scope with En Garde by Puzzle Muteson, a mysterious, intimate record by a fearless songwriter and lyricist from the windswept Isle of Wight. Arranged and produced by collaborators and label mates Nico Muhly and Valgeir Sigurðsson, En Garde is a strange, comforting and alarmingly personal record. Driven, spare lyrics are hoisted high by vocals of steady, sturdy tremble. Each tune swells with plush guitar pluck in a sea of orchestration and electronics. Recorded in the Greenhouse Studios in Iceland, the album collects Puzzle Muteson's odd and beautiful stories about love and horses, rust and polar bears, heartbreak and birds. Puzzle's songs are curious sounds from a troubled heart and his lyrics are urgent and open, striking a note with their vulnerable memories. "I Was Once A Horse" is an unforgettable song about nostalgia. The title track pits Puzzle's longing against waves of dense strings and jagged rhythm, while "Perspex Disguise" sets his naked, translucent vocals against shimmering piano that refracts off epic chords. In "Flamingo Head" he sings; "I left your house. You let me. I left you ugly," buffeted by guitar and distant murmurs. "Not a single thing could take this magical sight. I'll find you still," he sings on "Medusa," the story of a man tracking down a lost love. Like many Bedroom Community recordings, En Garde takes an unexpected and unique voice and elevates it out of any easily discernible pocket. Puzzle Muteson could be "folk" or something completely different -- instead he's an intense stranger from the Isle of Wight -- at once both familiar and unfamiliar. En Garde heralds a haunting and essential new voice, beautiful, earned and yearning.

Artist:	FROST & DANIEL BJARNASON, BEN
Title:	Solaris
Label:	BEDROOM COMMUNITY (ICELAND)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	HVALUR 012CD

Ben Frost and Daníel Bjarnason are two composers used to shrugging off the distinction between experimental sound art and deeply-felt melodies. Frost's vast, blackened post-industrial works often crystallize in moments of quiet beauty before disintegrating in pure visceral noise; Bjarnason's orchestral music marries brutal modernism to classical aesthetics one moment and soaring ethereal harmonies the next. And yet here, on the tail of two widely-acclaimed releases; Bjarnason's Processions (HVALUR 007CD) and Frost's By The Throat (HVALUR 006/LP), we are given something altogether new. A unique collaboration, Sólaris is a quiet, stilled and all-consuming symphonic suite at once as affecting and uncanny as the science-fiction classic that inspired it. The power of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris is not in its futuristic sets, or in the hypnotic shots of the alien planet's weird, fluid surface, it's in the way the auteur juxtaposes his alien, futuristic elements against the intimately familiar. This is a future not just of flashing lights and video screens, but of wood and wool and leather, of dogs and horses, books and photographs. In Frost & Bjarnason's Sólaris, we do find the futuristic, gaseous atmospheres and pulses one might expect from a sci-fi soundtrack. Here they are carved instead from the warm, fragile sonorities of Sinfonietta Cracovia; one of Europe's leading orchestras, a gently prepared piano whose harmonies warp and melt before transforming again -- and waves upon waves of guitar. Created through a unique series of processes, Frost & Bjarnason's initial sketches -- improvised to the film -- were fed through software designed to correct music which tried to turn their dense and distorted sonic input into a digital sequence of raw musical data. Working from data riddled with error and misunderstanding, a human score was orchestrated; the whole process deftly mirroring the very core of the film's own narrative of memory and loss, alien doppelgängers and emotional feedback loops. Brian Eno -- who consulted closely in the creation of Sólaris -- also used the same film to create a video accompaniment to this music in another strange loop of computer-generated distortion. But here the score stands on its own. Sólaris is a journey into an internal world; into the self; a flux of wonder, horror, sorrow and tenderness; and a ravishing sensory experience.

Artist:	FROST & DANIEL BJARNASON, BEN
Title:	Solaris
Label:	BEDROOM COMMUNITY (ICELAND)
Format:	LP
Price:	$19.50
Catalog #:	HVALUR 012LP

LP version. Ben Frost and Daníel Bjarnason are two composers used to shrugging off the distinction between experimental sound art and deeply-felt melodies. Frost's vast, blackened post-industrial works often crystallize in moments of quiet beauty before disintegrating in pure visceral noise; Bjarnason's orchestral music marries brutal modernism to classical aesthetics one moment and soaring ethereal harmonies the next. And yet here, on the tail of two widely-acclaimed releases; Bjarnason's Processions (HVALUR 007CD) and Frost's By The Throat (HVALUR 006/LP), we are given something altogether new. A unique collaboration, Sólaris is a quiet, stilled and all-consuming symphonic suite at once as affecting and uncanny as the science-fiction classic that inspired it. The power of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris is not in its futuristic sets, or in the hypnotic shots of the alien planet's weird, fluid surface, it's in the way the auteur juxtaposes his alien, futuristic elements against the intimately familiar. This is a future not just of flashing lights and video screens, but of wood and wool and leather, of dogs and horses, books and photographs. In Frost & Bjarnason's Sólaris, we do find the futuristic, gaseous atmospheres and pulses one might expect from a sci-fi soundtrack. Here they are carved instead from the warm, fragile sonorities of Sinfonietta Cracovia; one of Europe's leading orchestras, a gently prepared piano whose harmonies warp and melt before transforming again -- and waves upon waves of guitar. Created through a unique series of processes, Frost & Bjarnason's initial sketches -- improvised to the film -- were fed through software designed to correct music which tried to turn their dense and distorted sonic input into a digital sequence of raw musical data. Working from data riddled with error and misunderstanding, a human score was orchestrated; the whole process deftly mirroring the very core of the film's own narrative of memory and loss, alien doppelgängers and emotional feedback loops. Brian Eno -- who consulted closely in the creation of Sólaris -- also used the same film to create a video accompaniment to this music in another strange loop of computer-generated distortion. But here the score stands on its own. Sólaris is a journey into an internal world; into the self; a flux of wonder, horror, sorrow and tenderness; and a ravishing sensory experience.

Artist:	PUZZLE MUTESON
Title:	En Garde
Label:	BEDROOM COMMUNITY (ICELAND)
Format:	7"
Price:	$11.00
Catalog #:	SELUR 001EP

This is the first single from Puzzle Muteson's debut album En Garde (HVALUR 011CD/LP). The music was arranged and produced by Nico Muhly and Valgeir Sigurðsson and recorded in the Greenhouse Studios in Iceland. The title track pits Puzzle's longing against waves of dense strings and jagged rhythm. With it comes the bonus track "Brittle Beak." En Garde takes an unexpected and unique voice and elevates it out of any easily discernible pocket.

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