Hildur Guðnadóttir
Hildur Ingveldardóttir Guðnadóttir (b. 1982) is a cello player and a composer. She started playing the cello as a child, and it was to be her main instrument at the Academy of Music in Reykjavik. From then on she got in-depth into composition and new media at the Icelandic Academy of Arts and the Universität der Künste in Berlin. Guðnadóttir is perhaps best known outside her home country Iceland, due to her many collaboration projects. Among other things she has played cello with fellow citizens in the experimental pop group múm, and the minimalist electronic duo Pan Sonic from Finland.
She also plays in the band Stórsveit Nix Noltes (Nix Nolte’s band) with a crew between seven to ten members from Iceland, playing Greek and Bulgarian dance music. Stórsveit Nix Noltes has toured twice in the US as a warm-up for the eclectic ”freakfolk” band Animal Collective.
Together with the legendary industry pioneers Throbbing Gristle, she has composed film music to the Derek Jarman film The Shadow of the Sun from 1980, performed live in 2007. The band performed together with a choir in the Turbine Hall in the Tate Modern Museum in London, and Guðnadóttir was the conductor. As composer, she has also created music for dance performances, theatre and film, as well as orchestral and chamber music.
Yet, her soloist career as cello player is tending to escalate rapidly. Her first album, Mount A, came in 2006 under the artist name Lost in the Hildurness. The record was produced in New York and the historical cathedral city Hólar in Hjaltadalur, or more precisely, in the 12th century building Auðunnarstofa, extremely well fitted for the acoustics of the cello.
As a sample of her coming album, Iridescence came February this year. The style is the same as in the second album, Without Sinking. The cello is strongly playing the part as a carrier of melancholy, yet never making the music subject to sentimental pitfalls. Harmonies and melodic songs are abreast with minimalistic and intimating tones and cello sequences in concurrent loops.
The cover art of Without Sinking shows a long-winded pier leading into the foggy water. Guðnadóttir has admitted that clouds and their transitory lives have been in her mind during the time of composing.