Eyði Horsdal (Faroe Islands) – In Silence Somewhere (single/track from forthcoming debut album)

Eyði Horsdal (Faroe Islands) – In Silence Somewhere (single/track from forthcoming debut album)

Eyði Horsdal sings straight to the point, no-nonsense songs, with subjects that most people can relate directly to and others that they can’t.

His previous single/album track here was about ’Old Friends’, “the true gift of life” as he says. Not the plastic ones who live in that midtown Manhattan apartment block and spend all their time bickering and bitching with each other, but the real McCoys, and especially the ones you haven’t seen in a while.

The subject matter is more abstract this time.

‘In Silence Somewhere’, the fifth single taken from his forthcoming debut album ‘Songs with Eva’, is about a mother having a stroke and her daughter still having to live despite it. “About a moment of silence and clarity engulfed in nature and a wonder. About the seasons, being alive, and the passing of time” he says.

He is joined again by the Eva in ‘Songs with Eva’, namely British songwriter Eva Perrin Fontana although she plays a background role here.

There’s something ghostlike about the way he writes and records. It’s fleeting, ephemeral, fuzzy, like one of those ‘supernatural’ videos that frequently turn up on Facebook and purport to show a ‘poltergeist’ passing through a wall. It could be part of the soundtrack to ‘Ghost’.

Especially when he sings lines like “but across that lake/half a face/ under the winter’s cold grip/Is twisted in place”. That put in mind of the opening sequence from ‘Don’t look now’the eerie psychological movie from the 1970s with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, when they lose their daughter, drowning in a pond.

That degree of evocation is impressive, to initiate a thought process in a listener that is wholly unrelated and yet not totally divorced from his subject matter either.

“And there’s a very clever and highly poetic lyrical conclusion (Eva is the poet it seems):

“You scramble and build a bridge/Waiting for the waters to wane

From those thin bits of timber/Your mind puts it together

It is not the summer’s breath/Or the winter’s sharp knife

That make or break a life

In fact, what it means to be free/Is to flow with the seasons

That pass in between.”

At the first time of hearing you’ll struggle to hear much of a melody, which comes out of restrained instruments such as viola, cello and double bass, but persevere. The second, possibly third time of listening you’ll have an epiphany. Trust me.

He’s from the Paul Simon and Leonard Cohen school of song writing, having grown up to those artists and you’ll hear them, especially Cohen.

‘In Silence Somewhere’ is out now.

‘Songs with Eva is out on 24th March 2023 on vinyl and digitally via Tutl Records.

Find them on:

(Eyði Horsdal)

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eydihorsdal