Vilde&Inga - Makrofauna (2014)

Makrofauna is the ECM debut of Vilde&Inga, a young string duo playing acoustic free improvised music, featuring violin and double bass. By exploring non-traditional approaches to the instruments, the duo greatly expands its timbral palette. The wide horizons of colour allow the music to develop slowly and organically, yet with a keen underlying sense of compositional form.

"When listening to Makrofauna", says Martin Rane Bauck in the liner notes, "there is a sense of discovering, or rather of uncovering, something that has been hidden for a very long time. Rocks, leaves and old branches are turned over, and out of the dark soil there is something growing out, starting to live."

The soundworld of Vilde&Inga - their macrofauna - is one of unobtrusiveness and great sparsity. The elements are few, often using the double bass harmonics as a point of departure. Slowly, small bits and fragments emerge, softly, carefully... Naturally, there is a division of the roles of the violin and the double bass, the former often floating over the steady grounds of the latter. But the dark beauty of the music lies just as much in the redefinition of the instruments; the violin refusing to be violin, the double bass refusing to be double bass. Using the outer limits of the instruments' possibilities, the duo conjures up a musical palette of their own, with a richness of nuance and detail worthy of far larger ensembles.

Vilde Sandve Alnæs and Inga Margrete Aas are classically trained musicians from Norway, who started to play together in 2010. Both musicians have studied at The Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo, where this album was recorded in the summer of 2012.

Vilde Sandve Alnæs (violin)
Inga Margrete Aas (double bass)