Style: Post-classical, ambient folk, experimental, a cappella (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Caroline Shaw, Roomful of Teeth, Philip Glass
Country: Sweden
Release date: 25 April 2025
The term “solastalgia” describes the mental distress caused by the changing of one’s home environment and the inability to prevent that change. It can manifest as climatic change, loss of species, rampant urbanisation, or any number of other alterations, but what it speaks to is a uniquely modern sense of grief. The inability of governments to tackle climate change is multifactorial—greed, stupidity, and denial are all in the mix—but perhaps the most important reason is the sheer incomprehensibility of the task. The unhelpful moniker ‘global warming’ belied the complexity of the phenomenon; the average temperature rises, yes, but the effects are instability, chaos. We are living through a manmade extinction event; the 1.9 million species on Earth we have identified are estimated to comprise a mere 0.1% of the species actually alive—scientists believe anywhere between an average of 24 to 150 species go extinct per day. Such a monumental catastrophe is beyond the powers of any human to comprehend, and so our grief is elliptical, localised, it intrudes upon us in banal guises, knifelike thoughts piercing consciousness at unexpected junctures.
I doubt that Rebekka Karijord would object to being characterised as suffering from solastalgia. The Swedish artist, composer, and producer has worked on film soundtracks as well as her own solo material, and my first exposure to her was with the original soundtrack she composed for the documentary Songs of Earth with the London Contemporary Orchestra. (a male ʻōʻō in Kaua’i singing to a mate that would never hear him never join the duet the last of his species and now extinct) For that project, Karijord experimented with orchestral mimicry, attempting to emulate natural sounds like running water and melting glaciers via instruments. To her latest work, The Bell Tower, she brings that same experimental ethos. (your father scrubbing at stubborn insect splatters on the fenders a Pollock-esque invertebrate morgue as he washes the car something you’ve never done as there are so few insects now) Named for the Rainier Maria Rilke poem ‘Let This Darkness Be A Bell Tower’, this mournful, anthropocene work centres on the human voice. Karijord used specialist recording equipment to record the voices of twenty-five singers, and then built a sampling instrument to manipulate these voices and her own, and turn them, as such, into her instruments. (terrestrial species are migrating an average of 17 km per decade marine species around 70 km towards the poles in order to escape rising ocean temperatures) Karijord herself takes lead vocal duties for some tracks, and is joined by choral group Roomful of Teeth, but every other sound and “instrument” on this album is made by the manipulated vocals of Karijord’s digitised army, and so, albeit in a slightly unusual sense, the entire record is a cappella.
“Lacrimosa” opens with a mission statement, sampling a speech by the poet and philosopher Joanna Macy in which she talks about the need to offer gratitude to the things we’re losing: “how do you say goodbye to what is sacred and holy?” (humanity is a geological event which will be measurable in the strata millions of years from now will we be akin to the Permian extinction) Mournful human voices swell ambiently beneath the speech, building to a complex choral counterpoint as Macy’s speech ends. The voices, wielded like uncanny instruments, almost hellish in their tones, transform into undulating sirens and a persistent foreboding rasp heralding the environmental emergency before us. (the sea ice at Halley Bay thawed early in 2016 and 2017 collapsing under the weight of the nesting emperor penguins thousands of chicks drowned too young too weak to swim to endure the icy not icy enough sea) “Lacrimosa” gives a strong flavour of the various ways Karijord utilises the vocal samples, varying from overtly vocal-like noises to ambient textures to mimicking extant instruments.
Some songs are more conventional: “Sanctuary” feels more of apiece with Karijord’s art pop origins and sees her take the lead with Roomful of Teeth harmonising in a simple verse-chorus structure. The ecological grief continues as she questions, “my daughter, have the springs gone silent / will you ever dare to have a child / or has the ocean reached your doorstep / and the sun turned hostile?” (my grandparents would recall six feet snowdrifts how extreme the winters were but it no longer snows a dusting at most perhaps cold but never snow it’s simply too dry) “A City by the Sea” contemplates a toxic sea with Karijord leading solo as samples pulse monotonously behind and the choir provide a textural polyrhythm, ending with a harmonised chant of “oh, let them take me now”. (approximately 25% of US congress representatives are climate deniers) Meanwhile, “Serenade”, a paean to nature and a yearning for transformation, uses vocal samples sparingly for a strings effect. The hauntingly muffled vocals in the mid-section recall a similar effect I’ve only ever heard on Ulver’s Shadows of the Sun, a similarly haunted and funereal record.
Karijord pushes the post-classical influences further on a couple of tracks, notably “You, Mountain” and “9th Duino Elegy” both of which centre around madrigal vocal arrangements. (in 2016 the Siberian permafrost thawed to reveal a frozen reindeer corpse containing anthrax infecting twenty people and killing one boy as well as two-thousand reindeer) The former is possessed of a percussive quality, a number of syncopated voices moving in and out of synchrony in bursts of four before moving into a sample-driven section that segues into ambient registers, allowing Karijord to take the lead. The latter is a rather traditional madrigal arrangement between Karijord and Roomful of Teeth with multiple harmonies singing in counterpoint, lifting lyrics from the Rilke poem of the same name. (rainbows glisten on sand they lure me in close until I gag every inch of skin ripples twitching inhaling toxic gas I’m choking) This, alongside “Lacrimosa”, is one of the more arresting pieces on the album, a haunted elegy to the earth and our transient lives upon it.
These more fully-formed pieces are punctuated by shorter, quasi-interludinal works. These tracks usually build layers of voices in almost post-rock fashion to a climactic volume before peeling back. (28% of all assessed species are considered to be endangered and at least 55% are vulnerable) “Fugue” bestows upon the vocal samples an almost brassier tone with higher raindrop voice-synths splashing with Poissonian abandon; “Megafauna Pt.1” opts for a lone synth and a desolate wind to evoke some lifeless tundra; and “Earth”1 is a peel of plaintive voices ringing out against the terrible void. Unfortunately, these pieces are relatively simple experiments with vocal samples which feel a little undercooked and their congregation in the record’s second half weakens the album a little. (areas of India Australia northern South America Central Africa and the Middle East are set to become uninhabitable within the next twenty-five years as temperatures soar to unlivable levels) They lack the experimental qualities that make “Lacrimosa” such a highlight, or the focal lead work of Karijord and her collaborators to ground them in a stronger sense of identity. The closing piece, “Vespera”, another more interludinal piece, is more successful for its placement, a fully choral requiem which, in its final moments, features a sound like trilling birds settling into the canopy as dusk falls. (mourners clad in black gather around the glacier a frozen monolith turned to a puddle and a plaque with an inscription: This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.) The longer sojourns on The Bell Tower demonstrate its greatest strengths allowing increased time for structural variation, evolution of ideas, and pushing the sample machine to stranger ends.
The most powerful weapon humans have is our voice. Our ability to communicate, to justify terrible things, to agree to deals with other humans, to collaborate in building grand designs, to stamp our mark irrevocably on the planet, it all begins with the voice. It’s the murder weapon we’ve stabbed into the heart of nature, which makes for a terrible irony when it’s the very same thing we use to grieve our crime. Karijord’s anthropocentric requiem is a salve, something to ease the grief through shared acknowledgement. The Bell Tower demands to be listened to in the balm of pre-morning twilight with Macy’s exhortation on our mind, with gratitude and sorrow. When the sun rises, we must act.
Recommended tracks: Lacrimosa, Sanctuary, 9th Duino Elegy
You may also like: Galya Bisengalieva, Courtney Swain
Final verdict: 7.5/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | YouTube | Instagram
Label: Bella Union – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website
Rebekka Karijord is:
– Rebekka Karijord (vocals, sampling)
With guests:
– Roomful of Teeth (vocals)
- “Earth” struck me as being rather similar in style to David Crosby’s “I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here”, written in an almost hallucinatory state and dedicated to his girlfriend Christine Hinton who was killed in a car accident. ↩︎
Bibliography:
- The Earth Transformed by Peter Frankopan
- The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Gilbert
- Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane
- What the Wild Sea Can Be by Helen Scales
- Lyrics (“Rainbows glisten on sand…”) taken from “Way Too Long” by Bent Knee
- Data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature
- Probably some other stuff I Googled and forgot about.
0 Comments