We got acquainted with GlerAkur a little more than a year ago, talking about the ep Can’t You Wait, with which Icelandic musician Elvar Geir Sævarsson showed off his innate artistic sensibility. The Mountains Are Beautiful Now is an album that contains music originally composed for the play Fjalla-Eyvindur & Halla, taken from the work of Jóhann Sigurjónsson defined as one of the most important literary testimonies coming out of the island in modern times. Sævarsson was initially proposed to release a work containing the faithful reproduction of the music used for the performance at the National Theatre (where ours works as a sound engineer) but, later, the whole thing was realized making it an album somehow detached from the visual aspect and recorded by a real band. The result is a magnificent work that, without losing its original character of support to the actions of the actors on stage, offers about three quarters of an hour of ambient music with large atmospheric openings and several incursions by more robust sounds, accentuated by the contemporary use of a double drum kit. A choice, this, of which you can see the reason for being listening to the already published Can’t You Wait, with its fantastic percussive crescendo, and the conclusive Fagurt Er á Fjöllunum Núna, which in the second half explodes in a delirious death industrial; for the rest, except the most tenuous Hall Alone, the wonderful Augun Opin and Strings make use of mostly acoustic atmospheres that envelop the listener, transporting him in the unique landscapes of one of the most particular and fascinating lands of the planet. The same GlerAkur sound could only come from Iceland, a nation that, proportionally to the number of inhabitants, has produced a large number of musicians able to mark the contemporary music scene (Bjork and Sigur Ros above all) thanks to really peculiar and innovative proposals.
Fortunately, Sævarsson followed his instincts, which led him to complete this operation from which a precious gem like The Mountains Are Beautiful Now was born: this is music that goes beyond genres, going to fathom the sensitivity of an audience whose feeling, inevitably, from a certain moment onwards will move in perfect sync with that of the author, reaching what is the ultimate goal of art, at least in the highest sense that we know.

2017 – Prophecy Productions