Ruth Wilhelmine Meyer - Klangbiotoper

One of Europe's leading vocal explorers returns with an audiophile sound environment beyond categories.

Ruth Wilhelmine Meyer's second album 'Klangbiotoper' has turned into something few would have expected from the exceptional Norwegian vocalist: A political statement: When I set out to record this album, I saw the atrocities that we were committing towards our planet and it got me thinking, Meyer recounts, I reflected on my lack of will to do something about the situation and about our collective failure to take action. In some ways, working on the album was a way for me to enter into a dialogue with the places, plants and creatures of nature.

These softly flowing, harmonically open compositions oscillate between folk tunes from Meyer's childhood and associative, almost sculptural instrumental parts, in which her band - made up of tuba, saxophone and percussion - is casting the shapes and outlines of the worlds she is singing about on the retina of the mind's eye. What may sound somewhat eccentric and experimental on paper, turns out to be intoxicating, intense and intimate.