Skúli Sverrisson & Óskar Guðjónsson

There Is Nothing Obvious About This Music. It Is Ambiguous On Nearly Every Level. It Is Intensely Private Yet Has None Of The Usual Halting Cadences Of Tortured Introspection. On The Contrary It Hard To Imagine A Music More Plain-Spoken The Melodies Are Presented Unadorned And The Accompaniments Are What One Might Term Sturdy If That Didn’t Sound Backhanded. It Conveys An At Times Strong Feeling Of Nostalgia Yet Carries None Of Nostalgia’s Usual Signifiers. There’s No Aping Of Old-Fashioned Styles And There’s No Hiss Crackle Surface Noise Or Reverb To Distance Us. The Recorded Sound Is Clear And Direct. We Feel The Two Musicians Playing Together In The Room As If They Were To Be Here Tomorrow Or Next Week. It Both Does And Doesn’t Feel Like Jazz Or Folk Music. It Doesn’t Really Adhere To The Forms Or The Performance Style That Mark Those Styles But Does Foreground A Sort Of Specificity That Is Fundamental To Both In Jazz The Way That Contingent Features Of Performance Become Structural And In Folk Music The Way A Certain Performer Distinguishes Themselves From Tradition. This Record’s Predecessor Offers A Strong Clue To The Sensibility At Work Here. On That One Each Of The Songs Was Functionally Related To A Person Or Context. And While This Set Of Songs Were Composed Specifically For The Record The General Feeling Remains That This Is Music That Lives In Everyday Life. And Not As Background Tint But As A Subjective Means Of Being In The World And Taking Note Of Ones Circumstances. This Is Why It Can Still Feel Private While Being So Direct And Present. It Is Charged With The Undeniable Intimacy Of The Listening That Lies At The Heart Of The Private Relationships With People That Anchor Our Lives. When We Try To Make Sense Of Meaning In Music We Tend To Reach For The Social. How Genres Form How And Where Particular Styles Of Music Are Performed And The Manner Of Social Engagement That Accompanies The Music. Each Style Has Its Own Baggage That Weighs It Down But Also Helps Us Make Sense Of It And Deepen Our Own Experiences Through Reference To Tradition. What This Manner Of Thinking Privileges Is Performance And The Public Space Of Music With A Capital M. It Elides The Fact That Our Most Private Memories Are Often Shaped By Music That Was Heard Alone Out Of Context Or With Just One Or Two Friends. It Elides The Memories That Can Be Wrapped Up In Playing A Song After Dinner Alone Or With Other People. Or That Week That You Listened To The Same Record All Day Every Day. The Most Deeply Lived Social Spaces Of Music In Other Words Are Often Domestic. That Music Has Some Kind Of Privileged Status With Respect To Memory Is A Commonplace. It’s In Everything From Proust To Oldies Radio. People Organize Their Memories Of Their Lives According To What Was Playing In The Background. But It Is More Subtle Than That. There’s A Sense That By Listening Again We Can Find Exactly The Attentiveness To Our Surroundings That Marked The Corresponding Moments In The Past. We Can Feel Exactly As We Did Or At The Least We Can Grasp Threads Of Our Previous Experience. It Is Precisely The Privacy And Vulnerability Of The Listening Experience That Allows For This. Further Because This Kind Of Listening Is A Complete Immersion In The Present The Desire To Re-Live To Re-Hear These Experiences Is Not Just To Remind Ourselves Of Where We Were When We Heard That Song But Even More To Find The Feelings Of Possibility From Those Other Hearings That Opened Into The Future. In Very Subtle Ways This Music Does This. Both Musicians Understand That One Relates To Both The Present And To Other Music On The Basis Of Single Moments In A Song. And These Songs Are Filled With These Moments–sometimes “beautiful” But On Occasion Awkward Too. These Are The Moments Where One Realizes That How Some Specific Feature In The Music Articulates The Feeling That Makes The Whole Song Turn Where You Catch Your Breath Stuck For A Moment Out Of Time. It Could Be One Particular Moment Of Voice-Leading How The Melody Shadows The Accompanying Chords How The Performance Waits Infinitesimally To Hear Exactly Where The Next Phrase Starts . This Then Is The Formal Musical Equivalent Of How Ordinary Listeners Use Music To Frame Their Memories. In Essence Though It’s Exactly The Same Thing And It Is This That These Musicians Understand And This That Makes The Music Both Humble And Mysterious. - Anthony Burr read less