Dulvitund
Huldar Slóðir
Dulvitund is a recording project for Reykjavik dark ambient artist, Þórir Óskar Björnsson. On his latest release, Huldar Slóðir he offers another set of viscerally exciting electronic pieces, well textured emotional maps, that is less an album you experience from a place of remove. It’s a work of art that you really must feel to fully appreciate.
Dulvitund, which appropriately translates in Icelandic to subconscious, opens with “Minningar Um Þjáningar” a spare, suggestive track that effervesces cool, metallic tones. It eases in, building gradually to a series of delicate synthesizer keys overlaying a gentle ripple of percussion. Everything is awash in a fog, storm clouds and the threat of more. At eight minutes, it bookends with long, agonizing build and fade. On later the subsequent title tracks, the longest at over twelve minutes in length, Bjornsson kicks up the tempo with a chilled out EDM feel that never punches through. Like the rest of the album, the closer “Kvol” lingers is an uneasy industrial belly, a quivering chill on every instrument.
Often times, the progressions on Huldar Slóðir will come across like the soundtrack to your most captivating nightmare. Bjornsson channels a little bit of John Carpenter throughout the record, from his spellbinding use of isolated percussion and minimalist production, to the occasional indulgence into 80’s cinematic sensibility. This is a highly recommended record, an instrument of bleak meditation, one highlight in what has been a prolific three years recording in the Dulvitund project, totaling five albums and EPs of tastefully gloomy tunes.
There are only three tracks on Huldar Slóðir, comprising barely thirty-minutes of spine tingling ambience, but every good map is drawn to scale, right? A capable cartographer can reveal the whole globe on a postage stamp, place it on an envelope to send it half way around the world on a lark. This is precisely what Bjornsson has accomplished on his latest, the seizure of vast, breathtaking vistas in a discrete package.
