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HVALUR 018CD
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This is the award-winning Icelandic composer's second solo album and third release on Bedroom Community -- hot on the heels of his Sólaris collaboration with label-mate Ben Frost. Daníel Bjarnason's critically-acclaimed debut album Processions (HVALUR 007CD) was hailed by Time Out New York as "coming eerily close to defining classical music's undefinable brave new world." On "Over Light Earth," the intensity of Bjarnason's orchestral voice is captured through meticulous close-micing and multi-tracking, a recording process that sets this recording radically apart from that of conventional orchestral recordings. This album is very much the fruit of Bjarnason's ongoing and intimate symbiosis with Bedroom Community's Valgeir Sigurðsson. Here, with engineer Paul Evans and the newly-formed Reykjavík Sinfonia, they have produced a suitably unconventional symphonic recording. As much at home in the recording studio as he is on the conductor's podium, it's no wonder Bjarnason is equally effective in collaboration with other sonic architects, whether it's the band Sigur Rós or his Bedroom Community label-mates. Over Light Earth comprises three major works. The title-piece was commissioned and premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and is Bjarnason's sonic nod towards the work of painters Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. The second -- the aptly-titled "Emergence" -- suggests a vast, pre-existing form just coming into view with steady harmonies manifesting in a range of unstable attacks, hesitations and anticipations. The final piece -- "Solitudes" -- is an early work that is in fact Bjarnason's first piano concerto, here reworked with electronics by Sigurðsson and Frost, demonstrating Bjarnason's mastery of more complex harmonies and melodies. It's between the simple elements and more abstract materials -- between harmonic motion and pure gesture -- that we can hear Daníel Bjarnason's compositional voice itself beginning to emerge.
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HVALUR 018LP
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HVALUR 007CD
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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.
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