Subscribe to Dacapo's newsletter

Bára Gísladóttir's album HĪBER is named 'Best of the Year'

Bára Gísladóttir © Juliette Rowland

Bára Gísladóttir's album HĪBER is named 'Best of the Year'

Icelandic composer and doubble bass player Bára Gísladóttir's HĪBER is honoured in both Icelandic Morgunblaðið and on the English blog 5:4.

People
08 January 2021

In september 2020 30-year-old Icelandic composer and double bassist Bára Gísladóttir's intimate solo album HĪBER was released. HĪBER is a work for electronics and double bass in eight parts, composed and performed by Gísladóttir herself. The title, HĪBER, is a reference to the hibernation state of winter, as a completely natural and necessary break from life. 

Morgunblaðið, the largest newspaper in Iceland, has named Bára Gísladóttir's HĪBER the 'Classical Album of the Year'. They write about the album:

“The composer Bára Gísladóttir is both productive and experimental. Her album HĪBER is a good example of this, experimental and provocative... To begin with, parts of it are indeed unsettling for the listener, strong tempests and extreme frost, but now and again you will also find the stillness of winter, the calm between the storms.

On the English new music blog 5:4 Simon Cummings has listed the 40 best albums of 2020, and among those are HĪBER, with the words “the broad tendency is for Bára’s bass to cohere into a kind of metallic sheet of noise the details and focus of which, moment by moment, are always changing.”

HĪBER was also nominated for the Icalandic Kraumur Music Prize 2020, which is awarded annually for the best Icelandic albums that are considered to have excelled during the year in terms of quality, ambition and originality. 

Stream the album.

  • Bára Gísladóttir

    HĪBER