SOFIE BIRCH & ANTONINA NOWACKA - Hiraeth

A second collaboration for Danish artist Sofie Birch and Polish artist Antonina Nowacka, three years on from their four-handed debut "Languoria", an LP that caught the ambient scene's attention for its poetic fragility. "Hiraeth", just released, comes under the best auspices, picking up that legacy and transposing it onto a purely acoustic plane while reinforcing it through a deliberate strategy. Label Unsound set out to put the two musicians in the best possible conditions, organizing an artistic retreat in Sokołowsk, a small Polish town immersed in the countryside, a place evocative enough to have inspired the writing of Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain".

The idea was to isolate the two from any contact with social media screens, phones and all those trappings of contemporary life that have become such a big problem, a constant distraction that makes an intimate search for the self so difficult. In the house immersed in nature they found at their disposal zithers, harps, classical guitars, a minimoog, vibraphone, keyboards, percussion, a pipe organ — a vast arsenal that both of them put to use.

Yielding to the vibrations of a space that is nothing short of enchanting, Sofie and Antonina's two voices, combined with the instrumental structures, carve out vaporous landscapes steeped in a pagan spirituality. A sense of transcendence, of a timeless stasis straight out of the Garden of Eden, radiates constantly from the finely carved, ethereal movements, relying above all on the act of improvisation, deliberately captured on tape so as not to lose the warmth of the performance.

The magic of the instant, intersected with the use of field recordings, sharply defines a deep relationship with nature, understood as a foundation for rediscovering one's own essence, freed from the constraints of daily frenzy. In particular, the resonances of the strings and the vocal modulations devoid of lexical construction underscore this orientation of the work.

The brief “Rabbit’s Hole”, more than an intro, is a statement of intent right from its title, a threshold through which to access an aural territory that is at once tactile and intangible, made up of measured phrasing in dialogue with birdsong (“Stars On The Ground”) and the crystalline sound of water (“Hiraeth”).

It's a luminescent sound with a lush development, yet capable of veering toward more shadowy solutions (“Comes With Sunrise”, “How About The Time?”) and constructs reduced to their essence (“Love Object”) without losing any of its forcefully pensive quality. A lucid dream sketched with disarming immediacy that captivates with its grace and its utter lack of cumbersome superstructure. A triumph of feeling alive and connected to the universe.

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02/08/2025