‘Recorded in August of 2023 AUGA is the first album by the duo of Gyda and Ulfur. When they sent the recordings to me I knew instantly that we needed to release this together, it is simply one of the most beautiful instrumental albums I’ve heard in a very long time.’ – Collin J. Rae: CEO, Sono Luminus

R-O-R refers to the chemical compound ether, when two elements come together to create entirely different matter. This ethereal compound also gives its name to the collaboration between Icelandic musicians Gyða Valtýsdóttir and Úlfur Hansson, whose new album AUGA brings together the two musicians in a unique new work of cosmic alchemy.

On AUGA the two musicians combine like electrons to create an expansive sound-world that feels like entering the landscape of a dream. The elements here are both earthly and alchemical: evocations of rain, geology, wind entangle with the oneiric and celestial. Úlfur’s self-made synthesiser soars and segues with sparkling harmonic threads of Gyða’s cello, creating a tapestry in which matter entwines with a luminous sense of the spectral.

AUGA is a new direction borne from a long history of collaboration between the two. Both have worked on each other’s previous solo projects, with Gyða playing cello on Úlfur’s album Arborescens, and Úlfur working on arrangements and production for Gyða’s albums Evolution and Ox. A deeper collaboration began, however, when Gyða and Úlfur created the Icelandic Music Award-nominated track ‘Morphogenesis’ for Gyða’s album Epicycle II. Partly created out of improvisation and partly composed in writing, and appropriately named ‘Morphogenesis’ for the biological process that causes an organism to develop its shape, this explorative collaborative process set the path for the deeply symbiotic creation of AUGA.

The resulting album is an elemental dreamscape of long-form music informed by the astral and eternal. The music made between the two has the quality of a kind of primordial plasma, with contours of melodies arising from thin air and swiftly shapeshifting into whorls of formlessness. On ‘Petrichor’, a track named for the scent of falling rain, a dew-drop string melody merges with the geological bedrock drones of Úlfur’s synthesiser. Elsewhere, the chemical evocations of tracks like ‘Esters’ and ‘Onium Ion’ take us on a spectral atomic journey through hydrogen and halogen, and the deep tremors of ‘Vacuum’ transport us through a sense of expansive geological deep-time.

Speaking about the collaboration, Gyða says: ‘ROR is a realm which I love entering. When me and Úlfur improvised for the first time together many years ago, we immediately went to this place, which was so clear, strong and familiar; like it had always been there, right behind the veil, and we were simply finding it again. I could never go there by myself, but when our tones met, we went there instantly. I love this realm, it is timeless, colourful and textural – a poetry of pure vibration.’

The music of R-O-R is a hologram made from two different beams of expression, forming a whole where sometimes neither instrument can be differentiated from the other. Carbon, silicon, horse hair and wood melt into one projection; a wormhole where both image and form, emptiness and void emerge in a dance of opposites. Gestures echoing into one another. AUGA is an ever-evolving nebula of sound.

Tracklist:
1. Esters
2. Volvelle
3. Onium Ion
4. Imine
5. Sintra
6. Petrichor
7. Vacuum
8. The End
9. Still Blue