A Closer Listen
The halldorophone is the creation of Icelandic musician and composer Halldór Úlfarsson. On its core-base is a string instrument, resembling a cello electronically extended to respond in a generative way to pulsations, pressure variations and other improvised gestures on its strings, and in turn to amplify and project them through the embedded speakers. The halldorophone plays out in uncontrollable ways all the gestures creating recurring feedback loops, feeding one into another, rising and popping and dropping depending on the amount of pressure and the vibrations triggered. The instrument itself can become a very physical and embodied chamber of gestures turned into sounds in an effort to examine tunings and the mathematical relationships between harmonic frequencies.
Martina Bertoni’s study of this instrument during a residency at Stockholm’s Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) is documented in her latest release on Karlerecords, titled Electroacoustic Works for the Halldorophone. The improvised interactions were recorded in Stockholm and were later edited in the artist’s studio in Berlin. The four pieces on the record offer different perspectives on how the instrument can sound when softly plucked or strummed with an emphasis on “tetraphonic scales that [Bertoni] could apply on the four main strings as well as the sympathetic group of strings.”
Moving from subtle sustained tones as in “Fades in C” to deeper frequencies as in “Nominal D” to the brightly elegiac musings of “Omen in G,” the album creates a consistent yet varied trajectory through the possibilities of a single instrument. Deep, meditative and alluring, the four pieces provide an engaging listening experience. The instrument itself acts as an algorithmic canvas for Bertoni’s aesthetic sensibilities. The closing piece, “Organon in D,” minimalist in its form is perhaps the album’s more melodic moment, a cluster of soft feedback and repetitive abstract melodies, an imagined organon reverberating in D: a beautiful way to end this improvised journey of discovery and one where the halldorophone takes the leading role, sounding more present and physical than before. (Maria Papadomanolaki)
Sat May 17 00:01:33 GMT 2025