These days I wake up most mornings dreading the news that occurred overnight.
Real horrors, manufactured horrors, intentional horrors. It seems everything with even a shred of decency is under attack.
Sofie Birch and Antonina Nowacka took to the hills with a guitar, zither, and a portable Nagra reel-to-reel deck to lay the foundation for what became Hiraeth, released on Unsound last month.
From the liner notes:
There’s no direct English translation for the word “hiraeth”. In the Welsh language, it describes a form of longing for an intangible something, somewhere or someone that no longer exists.
…
Unsound arranged a retreat in Sokołowsko, an idyllic village nestled in the verdant hills of Southern Poland, close to the Czech border…Recording directly to tape, they sketched out ideas with just their voices and instruments, reflecting their surroundings without being distracted or mediated by modern technology.
Birch and Nowacka finished things off back in the studio where they added DX7, minimoog, vibraphone, percussion, steel drums, and pipe organ to the mix creating an enchanting album (I said the same thing in the Audio Note review if that sounds familiar).
To my way of thinking (and hearing and feeling), this is medicinal music, music with a humanness and humanity that comes in a time of a great drought.
Soak it in, deep.