Sigurd Hole: Elvesang

Sigurd Hole's Elvesang enacts the crossing of a threshold where music loosens its claim on sound alone and begins to behave like weather, memory, and landscape thinking aloud. Recorded in the small Ytre Rendal church near Lake Lomnessjøen, not far from Hole's childhood home in Rendalen, the album carries the unmistakable feeling of return. Not nostalgia exactly, but a deeper settling, as if the bass itself remembers the grain of the wood around it and the cold air pressing against the walls. The natural ambience is not polished away. It breathes, creaks, and listens back. These sounds are not intrusions but collaborators, allowed to seep within until place and performance become inseparable.

The album unfolds as a meditation on water, not merely as a metaphor but as a method. Built around precomposed modules and played largely with the bow, Elvesang moves through three states of matter—liquid, solid, and gas—without ever abandoning its essential substance. At the molecular level, everything here is bass, resin, hair, wood, and intention. Yet the forms shift constantly, reminding us how one thing can behave like many while remaining itself.

The opening "Prelude" immediately establishes the album's liquid state. Arco lines rise gently, harmonics hovering like light on a dark surface. There is a sense of tension that feels almost physical, the delicate boundary between breath and submersion. It is not dramatic, but it is decisive. From here, "Løvskimmer" skims forward with the precision of a water strider, its gestures quick and weightless, never quite breaking the surface. "Lysning" expands this liquidity into something more atmospheric, as if droplets, storms, and distant rain have finally found their home. When "Regn" arrives, the concept becomes literal. The bow bounces, droplets forming and dispersing, each contact a brief life before vanishing.

The shift into solidity does not come as a rupture but as cooling. "Torden" introduces percussive pizzicato, heavy and grounded, hinting at forces far larger than what is explicitly sounded. There is thunder here, but heard from a distance or through the ground rather than the sky. "Fugler" remains percussive, though the bow returns, scraping and pressing, evoking a strange sense of motion. It feels like machinery moving alongside flesh, both cooperating and resisting, bound together yet uneasy. In "Skogdans," the bass seems to dig downward, its riffs splitting like stone under pressure, revealing something buried and shared. "Kornaks" closes this section with a more intimate solidity, the careful searching through a stack of wood behind a house, hands numb from cold, choosing what will burn and what will wait.

The gaseous state emerges almost imperceptibly. "Soloppgang" feels like ignition, energy spreading outward in stages, an inner aurora flickering into being. Light is suggested more than stated. With "Tre," shadows lengthen. Dissonances creep in, subtle but unsettling, like the first signs of illness in an otherwise healthy body. "Månemørke" opens the space even further, air and time folding together, harmonics rippling with a faintly nocturnal pull. There is a sense here not only of space but of duration, of listening as a temporal act that stretches beyond the present moment.

The title track gathers all three states without resolving them into a single answer. Its arpeggiated flow is a constant transition, water freezing as it falls, ice evaporating into mist, breath becoming sound, and sound dissolving back into air. It feels less like a conclusion than an acknowledgment that transformation is the point, not the destination.

In the lineage of solo bass recordings, Elvesang stands apart because it refuses to separate technique from environment, abstraction from lived experience. Hole presents the bass as a medium through which place, memory, and elemental motion can speak. The album listens as much as it plays, and in doing so joins a small pantheon of works that treat the prospect not as a challenge to be overcome, but as a landscape to be inhabited. When the final vibrations fade, what remains is an openness to self-transformation.

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