Last Friday, I shared my double single Hægari / Collapse. It has been almost two years since the last time I shared music. I remember sharing my EP called After Supper in 2021 as a meditation on Jesus calling Judas — his betrayer — a "friend" (Matt. 26:50).
While After Supper reflected on Christ's state-inflicted death on a cross, these two new tracks reflect on his defiance of that. As my ancestors would have called it, this is the song of resurrection. A refusal to be tombed.
I played around with mixing post-rock orchestration, neoclassicism, and the 808 sub-bass into a conference of sounds. I guess these songs are somewhat of a refusal to be genred, yet guided by the one instrument that has always held my heart: the piano.
Writing these songs have also led me to reflect on how music, as art form and performance, is more than just sounds or vibrations. Music is movement, a rhythm of freedom, a “cosmopolitical practice,” in the words of theorist Marcus Boon. Music contains within itself the means to make worlds, the inspiration to step into something new, something different, something real and yet a dream.
Real and a dream. Music is all of that, at once.
My two songs Hægari / Collapse is an experimentation in that — the dreaming, the worldmaking, a conference of sounds. And I am so thankful for everyone who listened, who shared, who texted, who called — who received what I had to offer. It is always so humbling to share the songs of my heart, and it is certainly meaningful to see the ways in which sound can still be so moving.
Then, may we all keep making sounds together. May we all keep practicing this exercise in movement, this rhythm of freedom, this dream of hope and renewal. Together. And ever.
sometimes, i wonder what could be. i know you can feel the earth squirming. squirming for some kind of (at)tension. some kind of now and not yet. who knows.
in icelandic, the word "hægari" drew my attention. it means; slower. like the descent of a rose petal, as it breaks from the stem, like Jesus descending from the clouds in a swirling dance. slowly. he stirs my impatience.
maybe the petal can guide us. this wilting rose of a planet. maybe this isn't the end... not-just-yet. maybe, in the collapse, we might find flames in the rubble. who knows. maybe, in the collapse, we might breathe anew.