Just as Iceland is a place where worlds collide – myth and modernity, fire and ice, beauty and harshness, so that landscape in all its conflications and contrast is the perfect inspiration for Eythor Arnalds latest album, Music for Walking.
And the title says it all: this is a suite of songs, both inspired by and the soundtrack to that vast, rugged, and awe-inspiring natural world. But, as you might suspect, that is also perhaps a metaphor, and the walk it describes is also one through less tangible understandings – life, thought, memory, and our own emotional development and personal pursuits.
Blending the modern classical with more ambient soundscaping, he joins with the music of The Reykjavík Symphony Orchestra to create something beyond music, a feeling, an emotion, a sound half-remembered, as old as the landscape itself but as pertinent and personal as any music can be.
“Progression” sits at the heart of the album, a simple four-chord progression around which strings gather, cellos rise, and at its core, harps and pianos anchor the song in atmosphere and tension to create a feeling best summed up by the famous phrase, “it is better to travel well than to arrive.”
Some songs seem to direct the listener, “Body of Water” shimmers in the dark, who knows what lies below the surface, and “Steps” is all about quiet momentum; others, “A Strange Loop,” for example, are more open to personal subjectivity. Beauty does not need to explain itself.
But what isn’t in question is how beguiling this album, this soundtrack, this sonic journey and meditative meander is. It’s as breathtaking as the landscape that helped inspire it.
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