Gail Priest - Heraclitus in Iceland

A Closer Listen

Iceland’s scenery is lovely yet savage.  The views are astonishing, from the Northern Lights to the purebred horses.  But storms can arise at any moment, and recent eruptions have solidified the nation’s reputation as the land of fire and ice.  One may drive up to a glacier on a one-lane road without guard rails, but if one should get in trouble, help may be late in arriving.  Last year a New Jersey tourist became famous for following his GPS six hours off course (having typed Laugarvegur  instead of Laugavegur, an easy mistake), briefly becoming a local celebrity; he then repeated the mistake on a drive to the Blue Lagoon.

Gail Priest captures the nation’s dichotomy in her dual-toned aural exploration, Heraclitus in Iceland.  The title refers to the philosopher who wrote, “You cannot step twice into the same river.”  Reading Heraclitus’ work while enjoying her residency in Olafsfjordur, the Australian sound artist finds further wisdom that she applies to her field recordings, one saying per track.  She is herself an explorer, seeking to understand a landscape vastly different from her own.  In so doing, she discovers beauty and darkness, locked in an eternal struggle, the cover image a perfect reflection.  To the beauty she adds her own beauty (the mallets of “So Much Water”), to the darkness her own darkness (the dark bass and pitch shifts of “Scraps for Sirens & Harpies”).  In so doing, she becomes one with her environment, while Heraclitus in Iceland becomes less of a field recording set than a personal journal.

Priest’s diverse skills yield a wide variety of timbres.  “Rusted Rituals” seeps glissandos and drones, echoing the sorrow of sailors drowned at sea, its buoys and bells sinking in an ocean of inevitability. The final waves bear not survivors, but debris; the carrion birds approach.  The winds of “Home Moan” are met by siren choirs as they whip against neighborhood flagpoles, an invitation to a shipwreck.  Yet as Priest turns her attention to streams, churches, and ultimately to the Northern Lights, the mood shifts from doom to delight.  Above, below and all around, wonders are waiting to be heard.  When cathedral bells ring in “Tocsin Tales”, their tone is the opposite of those in “Rusted Rituals” ~ flight instead of weight.  The album’s closing cut, a modular aurora, invites listeners to look beyond the danger, and dream.  (Richard Allen)

Tue Nov 28 00:01:01 GMT 2017

ATTN:Magazine

My fantasies about natural landscapes can be relentlessly optimistic. And of course, these places can be invigorating. I’ve never been to the northern Icelandic coastal town of Olafsfjordur, but through the field recordings that bluster and foam through Heraclitus In Iceland, I generate an idyllic picture: boisterous winds rolling across the earth and smacking into hillsides, goading the sea into roars, flooding the space where noise pollution and civilisation din would otherwise be. I acknowledge the strength of nature during these fantasies, but do I consider the way in which this strength would impress upon me? Or the perils of being gifted so much space to self-reflect and spend time alone? Do I acknowledge the cold and the rain? Priest’s treatment of these field recordings doesn’t accentuate the romance of rural Iceland. Rather, it injects emotional and climatic ambiguity back into the frame, shattering the image of rural landscape as an unequivocally utopian place of escape. Through melodies that slur across the skies like dark clouds, or voices that sigh like a lethargic, phantom dawn chorus, Priest turns Olafsfjordur into scenic setting for the mind’s more complex deviations of thought: the threat and promise of technological advancement, the nourishment and pitfalls of extended solitude, the benefits and isolation of examining one’s life from the outside…or even simply the sensation of bitter weather gnawing at the tips of ungloved fingers.

So often I contemplate escapism exclusively in terms of departure. But of course, there’s the matter of arriving somewhere. On “Alien Aeolian Infrastructure”, I hear the strain and whine of unoiled joints (potentially from a piece of abandoned agriculture machinery), while a digital beat creeps in like the jaws of technological obsolescence. And thus, the humble pleasantry of tradition falls victim to the spotless immortality of the 21st Century. On “So Much Water”, Priest uses the pattering of electronics to mimic the inexorable flow of a stream; perhaps as a means of aligning with its constant churn and change, framing it as a conduit for both opportunity and inevitable moments of loss. The album derives its title from Priest’s contemplations on an adage of the philosopher Heraclitus The Obscure: “you cannot step twice in the same river. Everything flows and nothing abides. Everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.” While I’m occasionally swept up in the beauty of this natural landscape, Priest’s framing of this material – be it through sinister reverse-chimes, or ominous choral marches, or loitering ambient smog – means that I never lose sight of my state of turbulence. Rather than offering a place for stillness and balance, these natural forces become analogies to those urgent, inescapable cycles of change and departure.

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Wed Dec 06 12:05:40 GMT 2017