Gyða Valtýsdóttir (Iceland) – Mother Pearl (single/title track from forthcoming album)

I have to say straight away that is an unusual name. I thought I’d come across most Icelandic patronyms but I’d never encountered Valtý before now. The Icelandic version of Walter perhaps?

Anyway, this single, ‘Mother Pearl’ is the fourth track from her forthcoming album of the same title to be released online by Gyða Valtýsdóttir.

The album is being promoted as “a meditation on creation, connection and inner life… considering how we remain open, empathetic and sensitive without being weighed down by the world.”

Perhaps they’ve found the secret to Zen and Serendipity in Iceland because the rest of the world is about as weighed down as I can ever remember right now and I go back a while.

Gyða explains, “Life is a miracle, existence is a miracle, reality is a miracle, technology is a miracle, creation is a miracle. The song was co-composed by a miracle, effortlessly with a dear friend Kjartan Sveinsson (Sigur Rós’ keyboard player), the last song to be written for the album and it ended up becoming the title song.”

Praise the Lord, that’s miraculous and there is a sense of the divine about it. For starters the album was written in Iceland, Belgium, California and New York City, and the record itself was assembled in bedrooms, studios and a summer cabin. The global village in action.

This is her third album of entirely original music and comes at a transformational moment, the ending of a decade-long relationship and a return to Iceland after two decades of living elsewhere. ‘Mother Pearl’ “looks inward without retreating, making space for tenderness, reflection and the subtle alchemy of becoming.”

And it struck me that one of the first things she would have seen as she returned home is Perlan (The Pearl), an architectural structure atop water storage tanks on a hill overlooking downtown Reykjavik that funnily enough we mentioned only the other day.

She says that at the album’s heart lies the idea of emergence — “the place where something enters being from a kind of silent potential” — and the title track embodies this idea as “a seed, is potential, is a gift, is… a fertile egg waiting to become.”

I’ll be honest I was starting to be a little bamboozled by this expansive imagery and to wonder if it might all become a little pretentious.

But I suggest you set that concern aside and just let the beautiful arrangement sweep over you, carrying its gamut of emotions, from despair to joy and back again.

You could transcribe it into any religious film or equally into the end of the world scene from Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.

There are parallels that could be drawn with Enya but I won’t go down that path because musicians operating at this level deserve to avoid pointless comparisons.

She has an interesting history, classically trained and then as a founding member of the electronic dream-pop band múm (which coincidentally released a new album recently) in her teens before leaving to pursue her own musical path which took her to Russia to study cello and then her first solo album in 2017 which was of personal interpretations of classical works.

Subsequently turning to her own compositions, she continues a journey that now finds its next chapter in ‘Mother Pearl.’

This new single comes as she is confirmed to score Residente’s forthcoming movie Porto Rico, starring Bad Bunny, Edward Norton, Javier Bardem and Viggo Mortensen.

‘Mother Pearl’ the album is set for release on March 20th via marvada.

Find her on:

Website: https://gydadiamond.net/