Mount A

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Editor's info:
This album was originally released by 12 Tónar in 2006 under the moniker 'Lost in Hildurness'. The first solo recording from Hildur Gu?nadóttir (who is a member of the Nix Noltes band and has performed regularly with múm and Pan Sonic). In her dreamy soundworld she plays the cello, gamba, zither, khuur and the gamelan so this cd sounds like nothing else. This is exciting, tranquil, and melancholic stuff and at times it makes you think of a lost place and times gone by - and the music has the power to take you there. Recording sessions took place both in New York and in a house in Hólar, Iceland, specifically chosen for its good cello acoustics. It is strictly a solo album, Hildur has attempted to "involve other people as little as I could." Like the cover art, it is personal and intimate.

It has been called "the perfect soundtrack to get lost in a forest at night", but this version, remastered by Denis Blackham, sounds fresher and better than ever.

Her latest solo album, the widely reviewed and highly acclaimed Without Sinking (Touch # TO:70, 2009) is still available from Touch.


Reviews:

Dusted (USA):

“I can’t catch it. Finally I see that every line is really the same thought said in another way. And yet the continuity acts as if something else is happening. Nothing else is happening. What you’re doing, in an almost Proustian way, is getting deeper and deeper saturated into the thought.”

This is Morton Feldman talking about a libretto Samuel Beckett wrote for the composer, but it could equally apply to the way that the cellist Hildur Gu?nadóttir builds her compositions. Multi-tracking her cello, as well as viola da gamba, zither, vibraphone, one-piece gamelan, voice and more, she emerges with teeming, resonant soundscapes. Her themes and melodies are simple, rarely more than a few bars, but the way she overlaps and combines them or pits them against long held tones, gives her music a tension between restless activity and quiet stasis, as well as an intuitive, almost improvised feel.

You could certainly call some of the work here “filmic.” “Floods” in particular has an urgent, up-tempo phrase at its center that could easily be a soundtrack cue. But to hang the lazy “cinematic” tag on this music would sell it short. Gu?nadóttir weaves too many lines together, makes the overall sound too full and rich, and uses repetition to cast such a strong spell that the incidental nature of cinematic scores just doesn’t apply.

Only the length of the album at times detracts from this spell. Combined with the way the cello dominates the timbral range — giving the whole a misted, twilight cast — the album drags in places or slips too much into the background. But before too much monotony sinks in, Gu?nadóttir eases a lilting zither into the bottom of the mix to give a piece like “Casting” an aleatory feel. She also doesn’t waste time without intros or outros too much, preferring instead to dive right into her material, in what feels like mid-thought.

It’s touches like these that give Mount A the feel of a virtuoso sketch artist, one who might draw the same shape dozens of times and never be finished, but whose figures always pulse with vigor and ideas. [Matthew Wuethrich]

Aquarius Records (USA):

Not a brand new record, but instead a reissue of a 2006 album from one of our favorite cellists, Hildur Gudnadottir, who in the past has contributed brilliantly to records by Sigur Ros, Mum, BJ Nilsen and others, but whose solo records are even more fantastic. Focusing of course on the cello, she also incorporates zither, gamelan, viola, piano, vibraphone and more into a sound that's haunting and brooding, mystical and mysterious, the instruments subtly treated, melodies multitracked, gorgeous lush landscapes of blurred string sections, cinematic swells giving way to hazy murky blur, notes stretched out into warm whirling melodic tangles, complex counterpoint, ever shifting overtones, every track here a gloriously lush and emotionally charged miniature epic that hovers in some impossible space between classical, avant garde and drone, but always with a distinctly human element, these are the sort of deep and powerful songs and sounds that effortlessly evoke a sense of wistful melancholia, emotions that are definitely at odds with the smiling candid snapshot cover photo, these tracks like miniature soundtracks for fading memories and lost loves...

So gorgeous.

Tokafi (Germany):

A gloomy medieval smack: Tantric hammer blows of time.

Influences can constitute a perfectly natural part of an artist's maturation process. But they can also stifle creative development. For years, Hildur Gudnadóttir would oscillate between the classical sphere and rock music, between her calling as a cellist and an interest in computer technology. It was only after she broke away from the dictates of mandatory lessons and turned towards studying composition and new media in Reykjavik and Berlin that she truly found her own vocabulary. Since then, she has somehow managed, on the one hand, to fulfill and even exceed expectations and, on the other, to utterly confound them: Gudnadóttir's duets with German prepared-piano-magician Hauschka seemed to give in to the neoclassical temptation, while wilful collaborations with Throbbing Gristle and electro-deconstructionists Pan Sonic brutally smashed it apart. Her strong affinity for the archaic qualities of music appeared to cater to widespread cliches about Icelandic music and yet a plethora of details revealed her to be a musician with a truly international scope. Today, her own name, rather than her affiliation with a clear-cut genre or scene, has turned into her real asset, representing a personal approach between tradition and the present, the concert hall and art spaces, meditative states and energetic improvisations.

This idiosyncratic path notwithstanding, aforementioned debut album, now re-released in a remastered version through Touch four years after its initial publication on local label 12 Tónar, was never completely free from external references. By making use of instruments like the viola da gamba (a precursor to the modern violin, whose popularity started to wane in the 18th century), zither and moran khuur (a mongolian horse-headed fiddle), Mount A's sound had a gloomy medieval smack to it, while the inclusion of vibraphone and gamelan elements simultaneously added a cosmopolitan touch of world music to the equation. Holding these contrasting poles together was Gudnadóttir's cello which, occasionally seamlessly blending with her own singing, represented the voice of humanity amidst a timbrally sparse sonic continuum that placed the listener inside the massive, fortified walls of a ghost-plagued castle in an abandoned Viking colony. Time was suspended, bent backwards and looped itself into acoustic Moebius strips in her imagination, speaking in runic tongues, expressing itself in tantric hammer blows and praising the technological advances of multitracking all at once.

Even more astounding, however, was how completely naturally Gudnadóttir managed to reunite minimal music's two closely-aligned yet nonetheless counterpuntual tendencies towards meditative stasis and vivid pulsation. Although these pieces were continually propelled by mantrically repeated cello-lines, their shamanic ostinatos seemed to be running against an invisible wall of tightly compressed harmonies and infinitely sustained tones, never advancing beyond their original point of departure. While one part of her music was always moving, the other never even budged, creating tense soundscapes caught in a state of perpetual suspense through their underlying antagonisms. The impression was not quite unlike the kind of nervous equilibrium upheld by the works of Hungarian composer Györgi Legti, from whose dense harmonic swarms the occasional melodic theme or rhythmic pattern would rise for a few seconds like a solar protuberance only to drop back into the gravitational field of a monolithic mass again. Consciously left in its organic unquantised state and imbued with a sense of breath and irregularity, these sequences were turning into inner dervish dances, into occult rituals of the mind.

Between these discrete and more often than not subcutaneously transmitted allusions, however, one could already hear the distant din of the drills and hammers Gudnadóttir was handling to construct her very own reality out of these recognisable building blocks. When, as on “Self", microtonally refined zither-patterns were dissolving into ethereal drones, rich, cinematic string swells were poised against visionary film-noir-jazz-moods (“In Gray"), or futuristic bell-sonorities and chiming bleeps created a scintillating, threedimensionally rotating caleidoscope (“Earbraces"), Mount A far surpassed the post of clever juxtaposition. Placed side by side, the seeming immobility of these pieces, mostly condensed to their three- or four-minute-essence, turned into their strongest character trait. Gudnadóttir was virtually sculpting sonic objects from naked stone, leaving their rough and grainy surface intact. The act of listening was one of feeling their texture, appreciating the rawness of their outlines and discovering secretly engraved nuances. It was the exact opposite of an ambient-artist's favourite objective, immersion: A concentrated, deeply penetrating analytical gaze which scanned her inventions and extracted powerful emotional resonance in return.

Over the course of her next releases, Gudnadóttir would gradually refine these ideas, increasingly preferring a combination of spontaneity and meticulous organisation over the expressionist outbursts of her early years. With hindsight, however, it has remained intriguing to note that even at her most impulsive and unfiltered, she never allowed her inspirations to stifle her creativity, tightly integrating them into an intriguing cobweb of allusions. [Tobias Fischer]
TONECD041

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Touch
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Hildur Gudnadottir
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Mount A
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