Ólafur Arnalds & Talos : A Dawning
It is surprising sometimes how much pain you can hold. Part of maturity, part of life, is learning how to paper over wounds, place bandages over thorns and splinters, wrap tight fractured bones. Everything from the ends of marriages to the erection of concentration camps, from the terror of uselessness in sudden unemployment to the anxiety of not being a good friend or a good child. I had anticipated on my first two listens through A Dawning to discuss its relation to the back catalogues of Ólafur Arnalds and Talos, the collaborators who crafted this record. The opening, a gentle electronic texture with symphonic backing dappled with samples of conversations about the purpose and utility of art, felt consonant with this approach; how did we get here, how does this work complicate those existing legacies, how does it point to the future? But I found myself humming the key melody of “Signs,” the second track, under my breath as I went about my day, improvised lyrics burbling up automatically as I kept cycling through this recursive looping melody over and over and over. And then I began crying, and I didn’t know why.
The third listen on (as I write this, I am on my seventh, the previous five having been back to back without pause), it felt like a slim knife had been slipped through the scales of that emotional armor that I carry, mirror to the one we all carry, and nicked an artery. The musical beds themselves do much of the heavy lifting. Arnalds has always had a gorgeous and thoughtful ear toward the way orchestras, well-recorded and well-tuned pianos and just the right amount of electronic accoutrements can provoke a flood of restrained emotion. The approach here reminds me greatly of A Moon-Shaped Pool, a record that is rightly rising in esteem as the years eke onward and the nature of it as a subtle and bare masterpiece of those core emotional colors Radiohead always worked in slowly clicks with people. But Talos provides the final human component, the one that keeps this record from being merely a new age-inflected orchestral/electronic hybrid record that provokes unbidden emotionality in certain types of us. He has this potent and portentous capacity for both a lyricism that navigates lovingly the boundary between evocative and elliptic against enough key details that they don’t feel merely vague, but also for finding both melodies and timbres of the voice that feel almost supernaturally emotionally charged.
His approach vocally here reminds me a great deal of King Creosote’s approach on Diamond Mine, his superlative collaboration with Jon Hopkins. In both instances, they lean into rather than away from their accents, allow naive melody to carry them rather than the often over-practiced and inhuman Thomas Kincade AI generated slop vocals we see married often to this kind of music. His singing doesn’t feel over-practiced; it retains that rustic and deeply human crackle of a good folk singer, knowing well when to hit the note dead on and when to let it bend and warble. The effect is that of sitting on a small boat on a wide sea, someone behind you softly singing as they idly stir the oars in the marbled water. There is a natural melancholy to this image, that oft-repeated to the point of cliche sentiment of the sorrow of the water, where you drag yourself to the ocean and the mere sight of the churning water reduces you to stupid, thoughtless tears.
There is something primal about that image, the rising peaks and descending calamitous troughs of the rippling water summing to nothing, that no perturbances good or bad seem to radically alter the flesh of the sea, that everything goes. The gentle distant voices on A Dawning feel like ghosts, lingering thoughts. And at a certain point, you, I, realize that poeticism about this affect, its colorlessness which stings like clean air, the cloud-drift of unmarked emotionality which pours like rain from your hidden wounds, can carry on forever, but that it all revolves around the same fact. A Dawning slices you open. It isn’t sad. It is sitting with sorrow, a thing the Buddha teaches us is itself a joyful act, married in that uncanny alchemy of the spirit, where dwelling within the cathedrals hidden within the self is so many colors all at once. A Dawning? Ah, that requires a sun. Of course.
Label: Opia Community/Mercury KX
Year: 2025
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