Indra Rios-Moore: Where Do We Go From Here?

Death is not a possibility, it is a certainty, and yet it is almost impossible to comprehend that life must end. The miracle of life happens, and as soon as we are born, death enters as an invisible companion. It is a companion that we might ignore most of our life until we cannot. But what do we do when it becomes impossible to ignore? How can we accommodate such an unwelcome guest as death?

Hospices are places where the fact of death is not ignored, and the question no longer becomes whether death will come, the answer is already given. Instead, focus is to provide comfort and support for the terminally ill, but also for those that will be left behind, because death often leaves a trail of sorrow, and sorrow has a way of making everything silent.

This silence must be broken. One way to do this is to transform emotions into words and song. The Danish-American singer, Indra Rios-Moore, has done this for many years since her self-titled debut in 2010 with saxophonist and husband, Benjamin Trærup, and bassist Thomas Sejthen. However, her album Where do we go from here? (2024) goes even deeper than she has done before. It was created in collaboration with Hospice Djursland, a place Indra has also played concerts, and it is meant to bring solace for the people at the hospice, but at the same time, it is also a very personal record: a response to Indra's own process of grief as the result of losing her mother.

The album may be personal, but it is not private. Instead, it reaches out as a wide artistic embrace with different art forms and voices. The comprehensive booklet contains words and art related to sorrow and death while the sounds change between spoken word and music, testimony, poetry and song. Even languages, English and Danish, are interchanged.

Besides Trærup and Sejthen, Indra is joined by guitarist Søren Bigum, pianist Rune Borup and drummers Søren Poulsen and Anders Vestergaard, but the guests also include voices from the hospice that provide testimony to the place and add storytelling between the music.

Another guest is folk singer and violinist, Sam Amidon. His high lonesome violin introduces a naked hymn on "Hallowell" that is lifted by Indra's voice, which gently intertwines with Amidon's vocal in the end. After a brief interlude where two women speak about the comfort of a hospice, an instrumental with Bigum's slide guitar and Trærup's clarinet takes over, supported by drums and bass. Then the spherical beauty of "Moments" comes, and Indra's voice is once again allowed to soar, accompanied by Rune Borup's piano whose ethereal tones are reminiscent of Harold Budd's ambient works.

It is a sequence of just four tracks where words, music and testimony overlap and shine light on each other. It continues this way on the rest of the album, with hymns and words that bring comfort to those that need it, and the fact is that we all need it sometime in our life.

In the booklet, the Danish author Carsten Jensen writes that death is seldomly a full stop, but rather a sentence that is interrupted. This record picks up the thread of the sentence and tries to express what happens when we have to say goodbye to each other. It is a powerful and yet understated work of art. A comforting embrace put into song and words.