By Paul Sullivan
To say it’s been a busy few years for Icelandic musician and vocalist Hildur Guðnadóttir is something of an understatement. In fact, it wouldn’t be hyperbolic to say that, in the last decade, she has carved out an entirely new career as one of the world’s leading female soundtrack composers, working as she has on a string of high-profile films and television series—Tár, Sicario: Day of the Soldado, Joker 1 & 2, and HBO miniseries Chernobyl—that have more often than not been followed by a similarly impressive string of accolades and awards.
For Joker alone, Hildur won the Academy Award for Best Original Score, the BAFTA Award for Best Original Music, and the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score, making her the first solo female composer to win in all three. Chernobyl won her a Primetime Emmy Award, a BAFTA TV Award and a Grammy. And even now, as she prepares to release her fifth solo album—and her first for the Yellow Label—three more films that she’s scored (Hedda, 28 Years Later, The Bride!) are all preparing to be released.
“I never expected anything like this to happen,” she laughs during our Zoom call. “Not in any of my wildest dreams. The type of music I make was never a route to become rich or famous and that was never my drive. But whenever you release art of any kind into the world, you can’t know how it’s going to be received, and who or how people are going to listen to it. So this kind of ‘big bang’ just kind of happened and all of a sudden I was going to lots of events and meeting people, and winning all these awards. It has been very intense, and I honestly don’t do great with being around a lot of people all of the time. I’m much more of a solitary person… being in a room with my cello is my happy place.”
It’s understandable, then, that the last solo record we had from Hildur was 2014’s critically-acclaimed Saman. But although she didn’t have time to work on her own music, she did manage to sow the seeds of a new recording, namely by leaving herself voice recordings on her phone, whenever inspiration struck, for a song, melody or idea. And when some musician friends and collaborators (Eyvind Kang and Jessika Kenney) from L.A. announced they were coming to visit her in Berlin, she suddenly realised she not only had the time and motivation to make her own music again—but that she also had a collection of sketches to build on.
“All the pieces on the new record come from what I call those ‘diary entries’,” she explains. “Basically, melodies or motifs that arrive unannounced when I’m out driving or even in the middle of the night. I didn’t actually think of them as notes for a future project, more as a mark of where my melodic headspace was at the time, so to speak. Usually people make a diary with a pen and paper, but the great thing about audio is you get this sense of time. When my friends said they were coming, I immediately realised I wanted to be in a room playing music with them. And then I realised the diary notes were something I could actually orchestrate and work on. They really did impact the way the record turned out too, not least because there was so much silence in them. I realised that I really had been trying to slow time down, which is really what you can hear on the album.”
Where to From is indeed a very slow and patient experience that emphasises the deep relationship between strings and vocals that has occupied HIldur since she grew up singing and learning cello. She wrote, arranged and produced all nine tracks but there’s additional input not only from Eyvind Kang (viola) and Jessika Kenney (vocals), but Liam Byrne (viola da gamba), Clare O’Connell (cello), and Elsa Torp (vocals). The album was recorded, mixed and mastered by another friend, Francesco Donadello, while artist, choreographer and director Gisèle Vienne created the cover artwork.
“The way I work with collaborations, as well as theatre and film work, is more of a creative dialogue with lots of ideas being thrown around. But my solo albums have always been mostly written and performed by myself, with only an occasional friend contributing. They all come from a longing to be with myself—with my own thoughts and without any outside influence—and it’s the same for this one too. It originates from a solitary place and is very personal, representing my thoughts as they are, unfiltered as such. Although it does feature other people, they didn’t have any input on the writing or composition. It’s very important for me to have both of these creative processes, the collaborative and the personal, as they energise each other.”
Musically, the album feels like a direct continuation of Hildur’s previous solo outings—not only Saman but Mount A, Leyfðu Ljósinu and Without Sinking, in that it possesses the same beautifully meditative restraint in both her cello playing and her crystalline voice. Her approach manages to open up new emotive worlds that are by turns haunting, melancholic and soaring.
“I do feel like I have been continuing along the same path for the last twenty years,” she laughs. “The way I work hasn’t changed at all. I have the same practice and motivation and even the same group of people that I work with. The only difference now is that more people are hearing it, and of course there is more fuss and noise, and more outside elements to navigate. It has always been really important to me to stay true to my original reasons for writing and composing music, which goes back to the early days when I played and collaborated in Iceland with people like Múm, Skuli Sverrisson, Jóhann Jóhannsson. Back then, no-one at all was really listening. We did it for the joy of music, of collaboration, and to stay sane during the winter months. To access music just for me always feels like solid ground.”
There was one other major motivation for Where to From—the appeal of performing live again, something HIldur hasn’t done since her last album. This was partly due to other work commitments, but also because she had a son in the meantime and didn’t want to be on tour all the time. Several dates are already lined up for this year and next in Berlin, Vienna, L.A. and London. “I deliberately wrote this record with a live show and setting in mind,” she says. “Which of course means I now have a lot of practising to do—which is terrifying and exciting in equal measure.”
