BRIDGES II by Ægir

This album was recorded January 10th-16th 2022 in a beautiful big white room in Dansverkstæðið. 
It’s a room I fell for when rehearsing for a weird little dance/theatre performance called Neind Thing - I would often show up early or stay late to play by myself because I just loved how the room sounded and felt - and I started dreaming of doing more there.
So I booked the room for a week in the middle of the dark, windy winter of January 2022, brought a whole bunch of instruments and equipment with me, settled in and spent most of those seven days there.
I had no set goal in mind, I just wanted to play around, experiment, explore, and record a lot. And I did. I ended up with I-don’t-know-how-many-hours of recordings that I intended to break down and mess with and build something out of, similar to the process of my first album, Crooked Bangs.

For the last year and a half I’ve slowly been digging through these recordings and have found that they contain seeds for at least two or three different albums. BRIDGES II is the first of those.

Throughout the week I was there I played and experimented with a lot of different things, but one of the most prominent ones is feedback, in various forms. I have been fascinated by feedback for a long time and use it a lot in much of the music that I make, but this time I let myself be swallowed by it and, rather than let it fill in empty spaces and cracks in the music, I let it take all the space; be the music.

I kind of thought I was just collecting sounds - building blocks - material to break up and use for something else. But when listening through the sessions I found it really difficult to break the pieces apart. I just thought they were beautiful and exciting on their own. Some are 10 minutes, some 40, one over two hours.

At some point I decided to collect them all in the same place and let them stand as they are.
So here they are.

BRIDGES II is a collection of mostly un-edited performances recorded over the course of that one week in January 2022. They consist of experiments with feedback, vocal loops, guitar pedals and a pair of homemade propane tank hank-drums. With a whole lot of room sound. Along with contributions from my good friend and incredible musician, The Wind — and the pilates class next door.

It’s just over ten hours of material and not necessarily intended to be consumed in its entirety, but can be a great companion for tuning out - or augmenting - your surroundings; on long plane rides, train rides, long walks in industrial areas or by the sea or anywhere you want to take it.

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