Mother Pearl is not direct. While sixth track “Checking In,” with its rising-falling cadences and verse-chorus structure, is its most immediate, the dominant impression of the new LP by the Iceland-born Gyða Valtysdóttir is that it’s about creating an atmosphere and then nurturing it to generate an enveloping aural milieu.
According to Gyða, quoted in the promotional material, “Mother Pearl is a seed, is potential, is a gift, is an aragonite, is a jewel created from an irritation from a grain of sand, is iridescent, contains all the colours, is vibrant, it is a fertile egg waiting to become.” Oblique, but it makes sense as these nine self-composed tracks are, however they are arranged, at their core about the voice and melody it carries: the figurative grain of sand.
Gyða’s main instrument is the cello. This is what she played as an early member of múm. And, to a degree, múm’s emphasis on a quiet voice is a defining element of Mother Pearl. However, with its use of the harp and kanklė (the Lithuanian zither), ambient electronics and muted percussion as well as the cello, it is also about the whole: a sound-world where “White Noise” conjures a slow-motion film of a flower opening to receive the sun’s rays, where “Riverbed” evokes the shimmer of the water’s surface.
Over the last five years she has, amongst others, collaborated or played with The Album Leaf, Ane Brun, Josephine Foster, Merope, Dustin O’Halloran, Marc Ribot and Anna von Hausswolff – fellow Icelander Jόnsi too. Discounting the soundtrack LPs to the films Mihkel and the recent Missa, Mother Pearl is Gyða’s fourth solo set as such. Back in 2017, her Epicycle album featured interpretations of work by Olivier Messiaen, Harry Partch, Robert Schumann and Sergei Prokofiev, along with other composers. She has also musically reframed works by the medieval mystical composer Hildegard Von Bingen. The result of all of this is that what Gyða Valtysdóttir is – musically – about has become blurred.
Although Mother Pearl is impressionistic, it suggests that Gyða Valtysdóttir is reclaiming herself after a spell of working to other's agendas, saying that this is how she sees herself – perhaps equivalent to, after a postponed incubation, an egg which has now hatched.
