“Milli svefns og vöku” was crafted for the incredible ensamble Nordic Affect, which I’ve been very fond of for years. I’m very grateful for them to have invested their energies to work with me on this. There is not a suitable recording at the moment to share.
“Milli svefns og vöku” is inspired by Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s novel Your Absence is Darkness, a story set in the stark, haunting landscapes of Icelandic fjords. While the novel’s narrative serves as a visual foundation, the composition focuses on translating its emotional resonance into music—particularly the sense of suspension, disorientation, and solitude. The composition evokes the feeling of a man who finds himself alone, sitting by a church in an isolated countryside. He is enveloped in the silence and vastness of Iceland’s frozen landscape, unsure of his identity or how he arrived there. The narrative in the composition, much like in the book, unfolds like a mosaic, with memories surfacing in fragments and scenes from the past emerging in a nonlinear journey, as though veiled by the fog of lost time.
The composition unfolds like a memory slipping in and out of focus, with passages that mirror the irregular, cinematic quality of flashbacks. The piece seeks to embody a journey of remembrance and longing. Silence becomes as expressive as sound, and every passage aims to be like a voice calling out into the dark, waiting for an answer that may never come.
The majority of the piece was composed at Hafnarfjörður, just outside Reykjavik.
Leave a Reply