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Maria W. Horn

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Maria W. Horn, “Panoptikon” (XKatedral, 2024)

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I tend to enjoy damn near everything that Sweden’s XKatedral label releases, but this half-disturbing/half-transcendent tour de force by co-founder Maria W. Horn still managed to completely blindside me. Panoptikon‘s four-part suite was originally composed for a macabre installation at the “disbanded Vita Duvan (White Dove) panopticon prison in Luleå, Sweden.” Being a panopticon, Vita Duvan had an unusual circular design “to create a sense of omniscient surveillance,” but that is just the tip of a very grim iceberg, as it was also known for its brutal isolation tactics as well as rampant torture and execution. While the prison mercifully ceased operations in 1979, I suspect I would’ve needed months of therapy to recover from Horn’s installation alone, as it pulsed in synchronization with the prison’s lights and the cells contained speakers broadcasting the imagined voices of the doomed prisoners. Thankfully, the decontextualized album is considerably less harrowing than its origin suggests, as its dark choral opening quickly expands into an immersive swirl of heady drones, spacy synths, and timelessly beautiful vocal motifs.

The heart of the album is the opening “Omnia citra mortem,” which borrows its name from a legal term that translates as “everything until death.” In the context of Vita Duvan, that meant that no one could be sentenced to death for a crime they did not confess to, but they could certainly be tortured until a confession was made. Needless to say, few were inclined to stick around very long, as being beheaded with an axe was vastly preferable to the alternative. According to Horn’s research, the crimes that could land one in Vita Duvan could be as minor as “drunkenness” or “vagrancy,” but several dozen unfortunate women met their end there because miscarriage and abortion were considered “child murder” at the time.

Horn initially channels that dark history with a deep drone and a haunting choral theme that roughly approximates the solemnity of a Gregorian chant, but that stark foundation gradually warms and becomes more polyphonic as more themes and voices are added. As the vocal melodies intertwine and harmonize with one another, the funereal feel gradually dissipates and the piece begins to evoke something more akin to newly liberated souls floating heavenward. That sublime transformation is reinforced further by the piece’s final section, as the voices fade away entirely to leave only a simple, pure, and radiant drone that slowly undulates its way into silence.

The remaining three pieces are a bit less intense (and shorter as well), but they are all similarly mesmerizing in their own ways. “Hæc est regula recti” borrows its title from a book on correcting childhood deformities and initially shares the “choral mass” feel of its predecessor, though the voices are massed in harmonized unison this time around. After a couple of minutes, however, the chorus again vanishes to unveil a gorgeous finale of immersively shimmering drones that flicker and spatially roam as a host of buried and whispering voices creep in. Horn then follows that pair of stunners with the unexpectedly spacy and hallucinatory title piece. “Panoptikon” initially reprises the same underlying drone as the earlier pieces, but soon takes on a bleary, shapeshifting sense of unreality as Horn’s synths swoop, plunge, buzz, and smear. On a compositional level, I am very impressed at how Horn managed to seamlessly blur the timeless feel of the earlier pieces into something futuristic-sounding, but the more striking feat is how the piece evokes both a prison riot of ghosts and an ancient church at the heart of a cyberpunk dystopia. The album then ends with one more inspired twist, as the closing “Längtans Vita Duva” is a surprisingly hopeful-sounding traditional choral piece that feels like an old spiritual.

I imagine composing music that could do justice to the sad and cruel story of Vita Duvan and its broken and damned inhabitants was one hell of a daunting task, but Horn was unquestionably the perfect artist for such an endeavor (especially given her healthy appreciation for psychoacoustic phenomena). In particular, I was struck by how deeply the prison’s history and the associated conceptual themes shaped both Horn’s music and the installation itself. For example, the speaker placement was designed to evoke the sense of voices “striving for community but hindered by the forced isolation of the prison architecture.” Moreover, the prison’s previous torture and execution practices were replaced by the different horror of three-year stretches of total isolation after 18th century prison reforms and that too was mirrored (“the only indication of the passing of time was found in cycles of daylight amongst the silence, uncertainty, and solitude”). I honestly do not know how this album could have been any better, as there is not a false step or wasted note to be found anywhere and these pieces cumulatively pack quite an emotional impact. To my ears, Panoptikon is easily the strongest and most memorable album of Horn’s career, but her larger achievement was turning something so soul-shreddingly dark into such a listenable thing of transcendent beauty. This album is a masterpiece.

Listen here.

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Maria W. Horn, “Epistasis” (Hallow Ground, 2019)

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This Swedish composer earned a lot of attention with last year’s blackened drone opus Kontrapoetik, but Horn has been a significant figure in European underground music circles for quite a while (she co-runs the XKatedral label with Kali Malone, for example). On her latest album, however, she seamlessly slips into somewhat different stylistic territory than I expected, as Epistasis is shaped by some very intriguing and inventive compositional techniques (one of which draws its inspiration from Arvo Pärt). And much like Pärt (and Malone), Horn has found a unique way to use traditional classical instrumentation that does not bear much resemblance to the current classical/neo-classical milieu at all. There are still some lingering shades of Horn’s darker, heavy influences to be found as well, but the most striking creative breakthrough on the album comes in the form of the tender, twinkling, and intricately arranged two-part piano suite “Interlocked Cycles.”

The heart of Epistasis, “Interlocked Cycles,” was originally composed for a larger audiovisual work that premiered last year at Stockholm’s Royal College of Music. Sadly, I have not yet figured out a way to sync up the lights in my apartment to recreate the full multi-sensory experience of that night, but the music is nevertheless quite beautiful in decontextualized form. Curiously, the two halves of the piece are the album’s bookends, so they are presumably intended as discrete entities. They were composed using roughly the same ideas though: Horn used a computer-controlled piano to achieve a steady escalation of both tempo and density. There is also some phase manipulation involved. 

In more practical terms, the opening “Interlocked Cycles I” resembles an ingenious, large-scale music box: it opens quite simply with a lone, somber arpeggio, yet steadily becomes warmer, brighter, and more lovely as more moving parts are triggered and lock into place. By the end, it is a complex lattice of intertwined, rippling melodies and it is absolutely heavenly, though subterranean drones and eerily whining electronics provide enough unease to ensure that a subtly haunted mood still gnaws at the fringes of the idyll. 

That same structural arc repeats for the closing “Interlocked Cycles II,” but it takes a considerably different shape, as there is a steadily intensifying sense of drama and grandeur in the underlying chord progression. While it is not quite as strong as its predecessor on the whole, the final moments achieve a mesmerizing level of quiet intensity after the chords fall away. I also appreciated the added textural flourish of rattling, muted notes (presumably from piano strings covered with foil or something similar).

The two pieces in the middle of the album take divergent paths of their own. On “Epistasis,” for example, Horn replicates the roiling grandeur of black metal with a double string quartet and some overdubbed guitar noise. It is quite a sweeping and cinematic piece that evokes sinister castles on windswept crags, which normally tends to be the sort of thing that does not appeal to me very much. To her credit, however, Horn almost wins me over to her brand of orchestral doom with the occasional curdled note and an undercurrent of more nuanced emotions.

Thankfully, the following “Konvektion” resonates with me on a much deeper level, recalling the sublime organ minimalism of Horn’s longtime collaborator Kali Malone. Horn differs significantly from Malone in her approach, however, as she works her harmonic magic out in the open and seems far more amenable to lushness and layering. The two artists are very similar in their compositional inventiveness and rigor though. Case in point: “Konvektion” was written for two organists (sharing an instrument) using Arvo Pärt‘s “tintinnabuli” approach, but with the twist that the chord durations are dictated by the breathing patterns of each individual performer. In Horn’s hands, tintinnabular music is less fragile and melodic than it is in classic Pärt fare like “Spiegel im Spiegel,” yet “Konvektion” achieves something similarly appealing with its enhanced harmonic depth and languorously organic arc.

With Epistasis following on the heels of Malone’s excellent The Sacrificial Code, this is shaping up to be quite an impressive year for Stockholm’s experimental music scene and I am now very curious about what the rest of duo’s regular collaborators have in the pipeline (Malone and Horn are part of a quartet that also includes Ellen Arkbro and Marta Forsberg). In the hyperconnected cultural landscape of the internet age, it is truly rare for a regional scene to blossom with its own distinct character, yet something quietly radical and exciting has unquestionably taken shape from such an improbably smart and idiosyncratic bunch of artists all playing together and exchanging unconventional ideas. I cannot think of any other milieu that an album like this could have emerged from.

With Epistasis, Horn has made the impressive leap from “fine drone artist with some cool conceptual ideas” to “formidable composer that other artists will absolutely try to emulate.” This album’s success goes deeper than just great ideas and skillful execution though, as Horn has found a near-perfect balance between the soulful and the cerebral and applied it to classical instrumentation in a way that is appealingly melodic, timeless, and distinctive. I am properly floored by the rapid and wonderful evolution that Horn’s work has undergone since just last year: Kontrapoetik was a strong album, but this one is on an entirely different plane altogether.

Samples can be found here.