Bedroom Community

Placing your music in a conceptual and methodical framework that has enjoyed an uninterrupted discourse through the past six centuries shouldn’t seem experimental. Placing an album firmly rooted in classical symphonic ideas of the late 19th and early 20th century out in a market defined by blowing these compositions up and piecing them back together with little more than a sequencer, however, should be. This is the place in the trajectory of neo-classical music that Daníel Bjarnason’s Processions finds us. In a musical culture so determined to push our crucial musical influences under the bus of experimentalism and abandonment of form, a musician who adheres firmly the classics (Mozart, Beethoven, Dvorak) would be and should be greeted as a true original, a wild innovator.

As the newest member on the Icelandic Bedroom Communities roster (there are four others: Ben Frost, Nico Muhly, Valgeir Sigurosson, and Sam Amidon) Bjarnason is in good company with artists who are grounded in classical music. Boasting two composers now, Muhly and Bjarnason, Sigurosson’s small imprint has a well founded reputation of putting out music that explores the edges of classical music while adhering with an academic rigidness to the practices of composition. Bjarnason, however, doesn’t seem interested in exploring the boundaries between classical music and experimental electronic like a majority of the Bedroom Communities artists. Bjarason writes music to fill concert halls, to score Lawrence of Arabia-like epics, yet fills a space that is intensely personal and emotionally transparent.

Ben Frost’s By The Throat explored the unnerving edge of the bowed cello buried under a thick pall of electronic manipulation. Daníel Bjarnason matches Frost’s frenetic, percussionist cello work on the album opener “Bow To String I: Sorrow Conquers Happiness;” calling out the instrument’s primal, throaty screech without the aid of distortion. The looped cello (probably the only the electronic presence on this album) played by Sæunn Þorsteinsdóttir possesses the same sort of gate-crashing immediacy that marked Frost’s 2009 album, but where By The Throat rarely lets up it death-grip, Processions announces itself early and then reels in the abrasiveness and then gestures to the graceful swarm of bowed strings and gentle instrumentation preening beneath the surface. “Sorrow Conquers Happiness” is the first part of a suite centered around Þorsteinsdóttir’s cello work and from here the rest of the songs take a subdued turn toward an orchestral patchwork of plucked and heaven-bent bowed strings.

“Processions I: In Medias Res” starts off the second suite on the album in much the same way that “Sorrow Conquers Happiness” kicked off the first one: by immediately startling you back to your senses. If you were listening to the last two minutes of the quiet “Bow To String III: Air to Breath” with the volume on your headphones tuned up to savor every diminishing melody, get ready for a rude awakening. The album’s greatest track, “In Medias Res” comes thundering out of the gates and retains that same intensity through all the crescendos and false-summits that recall most clearly the influence of Dvorak’s “New World Symphony” or Copland’s pastoral romanticization of the American West. The “Processions” suite, written for pianist Vikingur Olaffson (is that not the most bad-ass Icelandic name you have ever heard?) and performed by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, never betrays the grandeur or grace that these late composers infused into their sweeping pieces.

A notable exception, added as almost an afterthought, is the last track “Skelja” performed with a harp and percussion. “Skelja” shows that Bjarnason can work with a whole different palette, favoring minute, dark chord changes over the sweeping vistas of the previous compositions. The track gently recalls Finnish artist Lau Nau’s impressionistic restructuring of imploded melodies on everything from the harp to things she found in the woods for percussion.

With the giant steps forward Valgeir Sigurosson and his group of critically-lauded, relocated musicians exploring where their degrees in musical composition can take them, Daníel Bjarnason’s ability to tackle form, and pen sweeping classical compositions with nary a qualifier attached, might make Processions Bedroom Communities’ most experimental album to date.

Ryan Hall