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PREORDER
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ARTIST
TITLE
Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone
FORMAT
2LP
LABEL
CATALOG #
KR 118LP
KR 118LP
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
2/21/2025
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For her new and most radical album Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone, Martina Bertoni used the electronic instrument at EMS Stockholm to create four pieces that are massive in scale and incredibly intimate, sonically restrained and emotionally overwhelming -- almost ambient and always demanding your full attention. Aiming to analyze and understand their interaction beyond the composer's control, Bertoni sought to engage more deeply with the concepts of time, tuning, and, most importantly, control. While the halldorophone -- famously used by Hildur Guðnadóttir for her Joker score -- roughly resembles a cello and can be played like one, it is an electronic instrument. The vibration of its strings is being picked up, amplified, and then routed through a speaker. This creates a feedback loop that becomes increasingly complex depending on how much gain is added to individual strings. Úlfarsson gave Bertoni a carte blanche for how to handle the instrument, but she stresses that she relied on "minimal interventions -- some string strumming and plucking" that set the interactions of different sounds and frequencies into motion. Bertoni recorded the material in the EMS studio, later composing and arranging the four complex pieces in her home in Berlin, after which they were mixed and mastered by Ciaran O'Shea. While this can be considered a compositional abstraction process, traces of her concrete work as a performer are firmly ingrained in the music. Indeed, there is a striking sense of intimacy to these four pieces throughout which individual sounds, harmonic frequencies, and even subtle rhythmic figures seem to move both on their own accord but also according to a underlying vision that steers their interplay. Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone is an album built on and marked by contrasts. The soothing polylogue of single sounds in the higher register on opener "Omen in G" is counterpointed by massive bass drones, while the second piece, "Nominal in D," plays a cunning game of repetition and difference by combining thick textures with all kinds of rhythmic elements. "Fades in C" -- the longest of the four pieces, clocking in at 17 minutes -- unlocks the emotional potentials of the sonic qualities of the halldorophone, sounding at once serene and anthemic, and "Organon in D" closes the album by underscoring how Bertoni's unconventional approach allows her to seamlessly transform simple, quiet tones into complex, towering walls of sound.
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