Bára Gísladóttir & Skúli Sverrisson: Caeli
Sono Luminus
It's hardly an accident that many of the track titles on Caeli, the creative spawn of Icelandic double bassist Bára Gísladóttir (b. 1989) and her longtime performing partner, electric bassist Skúli Sverrisson (b. 1966), reference cosmological phenomena. Borderless skies and heavens are fitting analogues to the sprawling soundscapes presented on this release, its double-CD length likewise consistent with the music's epic scope. For the co-creators, Caeli embodies principles of freedom, openness, and liberation.
The two bring impressive backgrounds to the collaboration. Based in Copenhagen, Gísladóttir is a multiple award-winner who studied at the Iceland Academy of the Arts in Reykjavík, Conservatorio di Musica “Giuseppe Verdi” in Milan, and at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen. In a career spanning decades and continents, the Reykjavík-born Sverrisson has worked with game-changers such as Wadada Leo Smith, Laurie Anderson, Derek Bailey, Jon Hassel, Alan Holdsworth, Jóhann Jóhannsson, and others.
Though the release continues Sono Luminus's focus on Icelandic music and composers, Caeli parts company from the label's recent Iceland Symphony Orchestra release Occurrence and others like it. Whereas those emphasize formally notated compositions, the recording by Gísladóttir and Sverrisson is all about soundscapes birthed live. Texture trumps melody in their pieces, Gísladóttir largely bowing her instrument and coaxing from it a guttural wealth of creaks, groans, and wails, and with Sverrisson augmenting her with enveloping washes and tempestuous rumblings, the two generate an immense, billowing force-field. There are times when Gísladóttir's bowing in “caeli movendi sunt et terra” (“the heavens and earth shall be moved”) resembles a whale's keening cry, but for the most part the material generated registers as abstract expression, even if it's also suggestively evocative. As intense as much of the recording is, the duo allows room for the occasional quiet episode, the restrained opening half of “Stretching skies” one example.
Helping to illuminate the recording's set-list are track-by-track notes by the musicians, which is especially useful when track titles are in Latin, Italian, English, and Icelandic. Certainly the listener's appreciation is enhanced in learning that “unum caelum,” for example, means “one heaven”/“one sky,” and that “Sveifla” means “swing” and thus alludes to a pendulum's movements. Their comments also reveal the duo's less serious side, as the words accompanying “harmonic interlude”—“A little breather can't hurt”—illustrate.
As mercurial as the weather, the recording's nineteen pieces mutate through passages peaceful, convulsive, violent, and engulfing. Some statements are short—two to three minutes at a time—whereas others push past ten minutes into the fourteen and eighteen range. The question inevitably arises for those absorbing the release in its physical form: are two CDs necessary? Surely a single disc's set would have adequately captured the essence of the project; at the same time, it's fitting that Caeli is so lengthy (two hours and ten minutes, to be exact) in light of the epic reach of the music and concept.May 2021