Grydeland, Ivar / Henry Kaiser - In The Arctic Dreamtime
SKU
05-RCD 2211CD
"While time glides beneath Grydeland's fingers like a glacier dreaming of colder ages, Kaiser's guitar howls a song that cuts through bone and marrow. In the sun, the ice sparkles like a crystal palace, the danger of death disappears behind a fragile, plinking ringing sound that even begins to dance. Delicate on lace, not in clumsy boots. Followed by decelerated psychedelics in the jarring and flickering flow of iridescent freak waves, overwhelmed by the northern lights, whimpered darkly. Monotonous pulse is cut in opposite directions, crystalline barbs sprout, and in general Rypdalen and Hendrixen the two arctic sounds like two Scotsmen, which flocculate snow in 421 facets before finally whistling and whistling through the top of the skull. Dreamtime is the right word, and why take drugs when - Dali showed it - you can be one."-BA 105 review
“These two guitarists first met in an Oslo studio in January 2019. Having admired each other's work for some time, they decided right there and then to record a guitar duet collaboration specifically to create a soundtrack for a classic Norwegian silent film. They spent 30 minutes setting up to record and Kaiser suggested a short test recording to one of the less likely candidates, Roald Amundsen's 1925 documentary Ellsworths flyveekspedition 1925. One hour and fifty-six minutes later, they set down their guitars and shook their heads in wonder. They had played for the entire length of the film without breaks, in the process creating a complete score for the film.
The Norwegian explorer was a key figure of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. In 1911, he led the first expedition to the South Pole, and is proven to have been the first to reach the North Pole in 1926.
Across the Arctic, traditions of shamanism endure among the Inuit. A vision of the Arctic outside of mundane history, yet common in human polar experience, exists in "time out of time" or "everywhen", during which the land is inhabited by figures of heroic proportions. Amundsen and his colleagues were just such figures.
Grydeland and Kaiser seemed to have entered into a kind of Arctic Dreamtime as they conjured this film soundtrack into existence; playing in real time with the film. Their guitar improvisations explore historic events, and invoke those heroic figures of the far north, illuminating both Norwegian history, and shamanic time outside of history, through music.”