Hekla Magnúsdóttir: "Á" (rec release) // Enyang Ha

Hekla Magnúsdóttir: "Á" (Phantom Limb, 2018)
record release concert
phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com
soundcloud.com/heklamag

support: Enyang Ha
soundcloud.com/enyang_ha

+ DJ Special-K

Doors 20:00, concerts 21:00 | @facebook

pre-order ticets: @koka36
tickets at the door: 10 EUR

"Hekla pulls haunting electronic music out of thin air."
The Reykjavik Grapevine

"Delicately explores unfamiliar territory with uncanny finesse"
The WIRE

Hekla sings tuneful ethereal otherworldly, minimal yet essential whispers as sort of icy stories. spooky and singular.
A Berlin-residing Icelander, Hekla’s sparse, delicate, fractal music exists within these two worlds: dark and magical as Iceland’s permanight folklore; and (though beatless) as deeply sonic and intense as Berlin’s electronic scene. A long-term scholar of solo theremin, Hekla (shortened from her own name Hekla Magnúsdóttir) uses her instrument as an otherworldly and highly evocative Siren-call. A spectral, wailing, howling, lamenting yearning second-voice that underpins a soft vocal delivery, as if her studio had been haunted with a chorus of ghostly backing singers.
While a handful of reference points share a similar ground to Á - Colleen’s interplay of voice and instrumentation; the richly immersive filmscore work of sadly passed fellow Icelander Jóhann Jóhannsson’s; “grandmother of theremin” Clara Rockmore’s close relationship with such a singular instrument; Julia Holter’s intelligent and classically-aligned songwriting - Hekla’s music still exists singularly. A one-off talent, emerging from no particular scene, ascribing to no particular rules.
​As a creative tool, the theremin - bizarre, unique, rarely heard - can be expressive, intuitive and highly adaptable. In Hekla’s hands, her instrument covers an enormous range, from skittering birdsong of high frequency chirrups and chirps, to grinding, tectonic sub-bass. We are given the throbbing, apocalyptic dread of ‘Muddle’ and the baroque beauty of traditional Icelandic hymn ‘Heyr Himna Smi∂ur’ in sequential tracks on the album’s a-side. Appropriately, she also writes that the album title - Á - is similarly multifaceted in her native Icelandic: “a river is an á and also it means ouch like when you hurt yourself, and also when you put something on top of something you put it á (on) something.”