Evoking fjords of Iceland
Cryptic Nights: D Ý R A CCA, Glasgow ✪✪✪
D Ý R A is a beatific collaboration between sound artist Sam Annand, lighting designer Emma Jones and Scottish-portuguese musician Su Shaw, aka electronica artist Shhe, who improvises a live score inspired by her residency in Dýrafjörður on Iceland’s Westfjords peninsula which is intended to evoke the meditative experience of her time in the fjord.
At a time of year when Iceland is bathed in almost perpetual daylight, a small socially distanced audience in Glasgow were ushered into the dark, hermetic space of CCA5, invited to remove their shoes and choose a yoga mat on which to recline.
Lying supine in a Persil white tented pavilion, the audience were given a few minutes to acclimatise to their new perspective before the audio-visual display began with subtly shifting colours, from cool blues to burnished yellow, dappled on to the veined canvas and a more concentrated rosette of light directly above, ebbing from glacier blue-white to the electric green of the Northern Lights to the wan pink of a wintery sunset.
Gradually the accompanying soundscape enveloped the space, the constant whorl of arctic wind contrasting with the gentle waft of the venue’s silent air conditioning, while Shhe’s peaceful, expansive, elemental wash, created from some darkened corner of the room, complemented the sonic details – the distant crash of the ocean, the cracking of ice and the lapping of waves – which emerged to punctuate the surround sound serenity.