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May 01, 2019 Carl Michael von Hausswolff By Christopher Roberts

Jónsi of Iceland’s Sigur Rós has teamed up with Stockholm-based visual artist/electro-acoustic composer Carl Michael von Hausswolff as Dark Morph, a one-off ambient project. They have announced a self-titled album and shared one of its tracks, “Beka Yalo.” Dark Morph is due out digitally on May 10 via the band’s own Krunk label and on vinyl via The Vinyl Factory. Listen to “Beka Yalo” below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover art.

A press release explains how the collaboration came about: “The project came to life last summer onboard the research vessel Dardanella in the seas around Fiji, where hydrophone and field recordings made by the pair were sampled and manipulated during a trip driven by artistic exchange and collaboration. Jónsi and Carl Michael recorded humpback whales in Tonga, bats in Fiji, and the strange murmurations of shrimps in the waters between - as well as the eponymous ‘dark morph’ heron of the islands. “

Von Hausswolff had this to say in a press release: “While we were on the boat I started to take the recordings, manipulate them and mutate them into drones or other types of musical functions-so we could use the sounds as instruments for building compositions. We decided, ‘Let’s try not to have them sounding too much like real sounds, let’s turn them into something else.’ When I had done some drones, some long tones out of a bird or something, I gave it to Jónsi and he started to peel off certain types of melodious things, and then play it to me. And then we started to just throw the ball back and forth.”

Dark Morph Tracklist:

1. SO(NG)QE
2. URA DARDANELLA
3. BEKA TOVUTO
4. TOVUTO
5. KAVURA
6. WAI
7. BANI MANUMANU
8. BEKA YALO

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