If you would, coax your mind back to a time when you believed ducking your head beneath the covers was ample defense against the bogeyman. Do you remember, in the haze of half-sleep, seeing something or someone in your room that didn’t belong? As you breathlessly flicked on the light, you were relieved to find it was only a chair lopsided with laundry, or a vacuum propped against the doorframe. That faint halo of light, surrounding this once sinister and now innocuous object, that is the penumbra – that permeable border between light and dark. This is the space where Enigma lives.

We’ve all been living in an in-between of sorts for the last year, haven’t we? Nothing quite as poetic as the blend of blinding light and unfath- omable dark one encounters with an eclipse, an early touchstone for this composition it is worth noting. But we’ve done quite a bit of living in the grey area, which is maybe broader than we thought. The thing is, traveling to Virginia to record this album was in some ways the first glint of hope on the horizon...well...that there was still a horizon.

This album is the result of a multi-year alchemy between the singular writing of composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir and the playing of three-time GRAMMY nominees Spektral Quartet. The first string quartet composed by Thorvaldsdottir, Enigma is simultaneously colossal and introspective, moving between heart-wrenching chord progressions and the scrapes and clicks of extended string techniques. A piece of profound emotional magnitude, Enigma provokes considerations of our relationship to the vast cosmos that surrounds us – and the infinite universe within.

Doyle Armbrust

ENIGMA Movement I: [11:17]

ENIGMA Movement II: [7:54]

ENIGMA Movement III: [9:14]

Total Time: [28:21]

Total time: 28:21
Release date: August 27, 2021
UPC: 053479225023

Also Available From

Apple Music

Spotify

Bandcamp

Amazon

HDtracks

NativeDSD

ArkivMusic

More from Sono Luminus

Quotes & Reviews

“Anna Thorvaldsdottir's mesmerizing score emphasizes the scope and scale of sound, exploring the seemingly unlimited timbres of a string quartet..." - BBC Music Magazine

“A terrific disc, and one of the best contemporary releases of the year. …Unmissable.” - Graham Rickson, The Arts Desk

 “quite simply a  magnificent achievement and a major  addition to the string quartet repertoire, here given a committed,  lovingly crafted performance by the Chicago-based Spektral Quartet… It’s a mesmerising, cathartic  performance, captured in close,  authentic sound.” - David Kettle, The Strad

“Masterfully performed by Chicago’s Spektral Quartet, this three-movement gem balances astringent abstraction—including unpitched noises and percussive extended techniques—with melancholic grandeur, often voicing those polarities at once. The aptly titled Enigma is fueled by a sense of mystery, translating sounds foreign and familiar to our holistic experiences on Earth in order to deliberately smear the line between the quotidian and the sublime. Sounds from each side of the divide overlap, collide, and inform one another, producing a deliciously ambiguous trip that seems apropos for our fraught times. Despite the emotional uncertainty some passages transmit, spiked as they are with dissonance and brittleness, there’s an abiding humanity at the heart of the music that provides a guiding light.” - Peter Margasak, Best of Bandcamp Contemporary Classical: August 2021

“imagine you're suspended in some primordial gas cloud where matter is transforming, regenerating, building toward the birth of a planet. In the final section of the half-hour piece, long arcs of shifting sound deliver melodies in slow motion, while the composer's extended techniques for the players can make a violin sound like a woodwind or a synthesizer. Percussive creaks and snaps collide with slippery glissandos that flash across the score like tails of cosmic particles in the black nothingness. The performance, by the Spektral Quartet, makes the music feel vast and intimate at once.” - Tom Huizenga, NPR

“The voices on the three-movement piece sigh and howl, caress and gash, cry out and whisper. Some scratching sounds inevitably give me goosebumps on the skin, the way the human nails kiss the chalkboard (I wonder what the articulation for those “notes” looks like on a sheet), as I imagine phantoms in the dark, their shadows on the walls and in between my bedsheets. There is a movement in the corner of my room, but when I look it’s gone, and only curtains slowly sway with their disdain and laughter. This music is unnerving, ominous and raw, and, once again, I wonder how these sounds can convey a real feeling.” - Headphone Commute

“Enigma — the piece and the album — feels like a desolate netherworld of slowly creeping cries and murmurs, at times like an out-of-body trip beyond the confines of time.” “But this is no mere collection of eerie sound effects — Enigma evolves as the mysterious noises gradually blend into the chordal structures. In the third movement, particularly, multiple layers of sound spin centripetally into harmoniously stable grounds, only to ebb away at last into the pitchlessness of the opening. With that deceptively simple approach, Anna upends the string quartet genre and takes the listener on a nearly psychedelic trip into the unknown.” - Esteban Meneses, I Care If You Listen

“Recording and performance are both keenly tuned into Thorvaldsdottir’s creative world. The ambience is deep enough to accommodate her gigantic landscapes.” - David McDade, MusicWeb International

“Enigma is instantly arresting. Long, drawn-out chords further the piece's grip, almost physically pulling you in, as a melody emerges from the drip-drip-drip of the sequences. More breathing, the sound of insects ascending in a swarm, glassy notes interleaving, and sustained drones all assemble in a sound world that seems as visual as it is sonic.” - Jeremy Shatan, AnEarful

“The cumulative effect is haunting and the experience of monitoring the unfolding engrossing, especially when it's impossible to anticipate where the material will go next and when it's so densely packed with detail.” - Ron Schepper, Textura

“This is an utterly fascinating piece, at once evoking feelings of immensity and intimacy, tension and calm, or, to paraphrase Kant, the starry heavens above and the moral law within. The music is strange, but compelling, and it invites repeated listening, yielding new delights each time.” - Kzrl W. Nehring, Classical Candor

“The essence of Thorvaldsdottir’s language in this string quartet is much the same as in her orchestral writing: bracing, incalculable, and elemental — yet appealing to the ear. The contrasts between otherworldly “sound episodes” and the recurring chorale gestures, for one, are affecting. And there are moments of unabashed, sensuous beauty, like the radiant, cathartic episode just before the finale’s sorrowful coda.” - Jonathan Blumhofer, Arts Fuse

“The Spektral Quartet performs both the micro and macro levels of the piece with an admirable sense of pacing and keen attention to detail. Enigma is our first Best of 2021 pick.” - Christian Carey, Sequenza 21

“Anna Thorvaldsdóttir’s Enigma inhabits a hazy, hallucinogenic dream-world of half-formed shapes fusing hypnotically in and out of focus. It’s a striking first string quartet by the young Icelandic composer, rendered here with glacial grandeur by the Chicago-based Spektral Quartet, whose acutely detailed, inordinately sensitive playing precisely pitches itself at the boiling centre of still-forming immensities.” - Michael Quinn, Limelight Magazine

“Perhaps the most wonderful chamber music album of the year, Spektral Quartet’s recorded performance of Enigma makes a tremendous impact on the new EP-abum. An absolutely riveting score, abundant with sonorous and textural finesse, clad in terrific array of harmonic colour, Enigma is certainly one of those pieces that gain from repeated hearings. As Thorvaldsdottir’s musical imagination unfolds in the hands of the four extraordinary musicians of the Spektral Quartet, the listener is treated with incessant discovery, resulting in many joyful hours spent in the unique sounding realm of Enigma.” - Jari Kallio, Adventures In Music