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Artist News Gigs & Festivals Releases
Jónsi and Carl Michael Von Hausswolff to release oceanic album as Dark Morph
By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 2 May 2019
Sigur Rós frontman Jónsi and composer Carl Michael Von Hausswolff have formed a new group, Dark Morph, and will release their debut this month, they have announced.
The music on the album was developed as part of a fellowship programme at ocean-focussed arts organisation the TBA21-Academy. It was recorded on a boat off the coast of Fiji and features the sounds of humpback whales, bats and (perhaps most importantly) dark morph herons, among other creatures.
Von Hausswolff (father of Anna, if you were wondering) explains: “While we were on the boat, I started to take the recordings, manipulate them and mutate them into drones or other types of musical functions – so we could use the sounds as instruments for building compositions”.
“We decided”, he goes on, “‘let’s try not to have them sounding too much like real sounds, let’s turn them into something else’. When I had done some drones, some long tones out of a bird or something, I gave it to Jónsi and he started to peel off certain types of melodious things, and then play it to me. And then we started to just throw the ball back and forth”.
The duo will play a launch show at the Ocean Space museum in Venice on 10 May, with the recordings appearing in the museum as an audio installation form 7 May to 30 Jun. The album itself is out on 17 May. From it, this is ‘Beka Yalo’:
