Maria W. Horn

Black Vinyl edition. XKatedral is proud to present a new full-length album by label co-founder Maria W Horn. Melting Pillars of Snow is a collection of new compositions from the renowned Swedish composer written for Contrabass Recorder, Shō, Percussion, Electric Guitar, Voice and Electronics performed by Horn together with a chamber ensemble consisting of Anna Petrini, Mattias Hållsten, Magdalena Meitzner and Mats Erlandsson. The album also features narration by Horn as well as a guest appearance by Michael Gira on the first single Scythe of Saturn.  Melting Pillars of Snow sees Maria drawing inspiration from W.G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn which is a poetic reflection following an unnamed narrator wandering along the Suffolk coast in England. As the landscape gradually shifts the text touches in various ways on the passage of time and the distance between past, present, and future, reflecting both vast temporal scales, such as the cycles of the seasons, deep historical time and microscopic moments and fragments.

With the compositions contained in this release Maria evokes a similar sense of stillness - an environment in which the movement of time itself can be illuminated and observed.   The instrumentarium found on this album is Horn’s most ambitious to date and sees her adding a complex array of percussion instruments, wind instruments operating at each extreme of the musical range and electric guitar paired with her regular palette of customized algorithmic synthesis and electronic processing to weave a spiraling spectral tapestry through the audio range. Percussionist Magdalena Meizner performs specialized techniques on the overtone triangle, dubachi, timpani and tam-tam, as well as pitched wine glasses and bowed crotales. The low end contrabass recorder played by Anna Petrini and the high frequency Shō performed by Mattias Hållsten add contrasting chordal arrangements set in strict metric structures. The ensemble is completed by Mats Erlandsson performing on electric and acoustic guitars moving from gentle arpeggiated figures to doom-laden drones and feedback howls.