This Will Be Us

Twenty years after recording her brooding debut album Mount A, Hildur Guðnadóttir revisits three of her early albums in a new collaboration with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. Her 2006 debut album, an intimate exploration of texture and atmosphere in music of brooding intensity, was performed by Guðnadóttir herself on a variety of instruments, including cello, gamba, piano, zither and vibraphone. Now, exactly 20 years later, the Icelandic composer collaborates with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin for This Will Be Us, revisiting some of these early soundscapes alongside music from two of her subsequent albums, Without Sinking and Saman. The effects are often mesmerising. While cello remains central in “Ascent” (from Without Sinking), the underlying string textures are now more Mahlerian, deepening the music’s sense of longing. “Erupting Light”, taken from the same album, takes a weightier approach, the deliberate bow strokes of an entire cello section injecting power into the piece’s insistent, hypnotic motif. And there’s an almost cinematic treatment of Mount A’s “In Gray” with sweeping orchestral strings and the now distant-mic’d glockenspiel. Two new compositions, “The Song That Never Was” and “Blind Sarabande”, serve as a tribute to Guðnadóttir’s friends and family who gave her the confidence to release her music, turning work once imagined in solitude into a celebratory, collective experience.