No two melodies match on Spirit. Crackling electronics simmer beneath romantic cello; vigorous plucked strings encircle fluffy electronic plumes. It is textural music, built from the constant layering and unraveling of each instrument, melody, or harmony. A collaboration between string trio Halvcirkel and Danish composer Anders Lauge Meldgaard, Spirit isn’t about blending the many ideas that it presents, but rather celebrating each individual part and finding radiance from braiding them into one.
Spirit was born out of a deep collaboration between Halvcirkel and Meldgaard, who have been working together since 2016. Meldgaard has even played with the trio, turning a violin part into one for New Ondomo. Trust, born from these years of partnership, comes out in the music’s ease – how each melody, no matter how drastic it shifts, glides into the next. Electronics, too, sail alongside each jolt of strings, creating a cohesive sound despite the many elements in this music. There is, too, a mix of highly structured phrases and loose, open-ended moments, lending the album its free-flowing, ever-evolving feeling.
Each track takes on a different style or genre, ranging from drone meditations to maximalist patchworks. The best moments pull together an array of ideas. Title track ‘Spirit’ pairs ambient electronics with sweeping melodies reminiscent of ninteenth-century chamber music, and then watches them evolve into twinkling repetitions. With ‘At Lyse Op’, the ensemble trades rich, pleasant orchestrations for pure texture, mixing tree frog-like calls, bristling bowings, and pulsating electronics. The track’s melodies cut off before they finish; phrases enter like bursts of energy, emitted and then lost before they are fully grasped. Elsewhere, the music becomes more predictable, like on ‘For Kun Du Ved Hvor Meget Jeg Nød Dig’, a short track of sliding tremolos and long-held drones that seems to stay in one place. However, it is in its unpredictability that Spirit feels its most alive, flying through each turn not to a destination but beyond it.
Perhaps most surprising, though, is Spirit’s euphoria. The album often feels like a jagged line, yet with each motion there is a real feeling of possibility, a sense of future and opening outward. This is most noticeable on ‘Babylove’, which passes around a sunrise-like melody, moving ever upward before it lands in delicate consonance. But it is everywhere – in the bristling textures and gritty strings, in the bubbling electronics and soaring New Ondomo. In the unknown, there is light yet to see.
