Nordic Affect - Clockworking (2015)

Clockworking represents collaboration, connection, and passionately fierce creativity. As put by Nordic Affect's artistic director and violinist Halla Steinunn Stefa nsdo ttir: "Clockworking, inhaling, exhaling; through music we immerse ourselves in creativity. We find moments of community and of individuality as we shape sounds from gut and wood. We encounter new spaces and interact with technology, which in turn affects how we play. We meet listeners with whom we connect and at times it feels as though we're breathing as one." At the core of each Nordic Affect's commissions on this album was the desire to explore the possibilities of their instruments (violin, viola, cello, and harpsichord) within a 21st century aesthetic while at the same time creating their own. The album's title track, "Clockworking" for violin, viola, cello and electronics, can be seen as an encounter of the human and the machine. It is by Mari a Huld Markan Sigfu sdo ttir, well-known for her work with Icelandic band amiina. She also composed "Sleeping Pendulum," the last track, which received honorary recommendations at the 2012 rostrum for composers. The second composer on the album, Hildur Gudnado ttir, views her work "2 circles" as a part of an ongoing observation of the relationship between a musician and his instrument, where one person becomes two sound sources. Hafdi s Bjarnado ttir's piece "From Beacon to Beacon" is designed as a conversation between two lighthouses and the instrumental parts are based on her transformation of weather forecast for the Garðskagaviti lighthouse into music. "Shades of Silence," by widely acclaimed composer Anna Thorvaldsdo ttir, is a piece which explores the "inwards and outwards escape to the subtle nuances of silence," as put by Anna herself.