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 unfathomable 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.
Cut to us loading up a rental van with instruments and gummy bears and hurtling 640-odd miles southeast. So much had led up to this point.
We had managed to magically edge onto Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s commission schedule before, say, the Berlin Philharmonic, and collaborated with video artist Sigurdur Gudjonsson to create a 360-degree immersive film magnifying her music, and partnered with the Adler Planetarium in Chicago to kick off what we hoped would be the 2020/21 Spektral Quartet National Planetarium Tour, and won a substantial award through the Music Academy of the West to reimagine the project in the virtual reality realm, and persuaded Carnegie Hall and Washington Performing Arts to not only be our co-commissioners, but to book the project as our Carnegie and WPA debuts. Enigma was then, and is now, a monumental leap forward for us in innumerable ways.
But back to gas station coffee and the perils of terrestrial radio, our van eventually pulled up to the charming stone church that is the Sono Luminus studio. What a homecoming, to be greeted at the door by engineer and surround-sound black-belt Daniel Shores, hear the reassuring voice of producer Dan Merceruio over the talk-box, and be set up with rooms at a literal farm with literal horses by CEO Collin Rae, Anna’s unrivaled US
evangelist who created a zealot by mailing me her debut album in 2011.
Now, to pivot from travelogue to the music.
The most striking element of Anna’s music, if I may be so bold, is how immense it sounds, irrespective of the number of players. It is somehow devastatingly personal and profoundly expansive at the same time. This
is music without an overt lineage...it is something entirely her own. It is music for staring out the window at cold rain, confronting a contemplative, unhurried dusk. It takes almost no effort, whether in a live or recorded setting, to fold inwards and watch your concerns and the audience around you evaporate from your consciousness.
I’ll be spare with the commentary because this music is about your trip, not mine. That said, maybe keep your mind’s ear open to the dichotomy of desiccated bow clicks and sweeps and the rich, sonorous journey of the
chorale-like writing. Each is only truly recognizable by contrast, and each infiltrates the other in ways that transform the setting from a concert hall to a garden of the gods. There are moments that will pull you back to earth, but what you will ultimately be met with is the emancipating and terrible truth that our lives ultimately reside somewhere in the borderlands of light and dark.
You may have an entirely different experience. We hope so. The penumbra is about seemingly contradictory elements being true, simultaneously. What we offer you here is the chance to embrace your own variation of the in-between.
– Doyle Armbrust