MANCHESTER: Hey! Manchester @ Cornerhouse

Thursday 2nd October, 2014

7:30pm

Event information

Ólöf Arnalds returns with a brand new album, Palme – her fourth – released via One Little Indian on 29 September.

Palme represents Ólöf’s most collaborative effort to date, and also perhaps her most profoundly sensual and affecting. Musically, it offers up an astonishing wellspring of fresh ideas and playful experimentation that move the sound on from the acoustic approach that predominantly defined her first three records, Við og Við (2007), Innundir Skinni (2009) and Sudden Elevation (2013).

On Palme Ólöf is sensitively backed by two trusted collaborators and friends: Gunnar Orn Tynes (founder of electro-folk collective, múm) and once again, long-term musical foil, Skúli Sverrisson (who has also worked with luminaries Laurie Anderson, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Blonde Redhead).

Lead single Patience, written by Skúli (who also shares writing credits for Palme and Soft Living) boasts an almost Polynesian vocal sway while Defining Gender’s gentle bossa nova and swelling strings conspire to make it so tender it threatens to burst at any moment. Elsewhere subtle electronics guide Hypnose’s gentle propulsion and Half Steady’s strange, robotic cacophony. Some songs, such as Turtledove, are brand new, while others are old friends – Half Steady was written by Ólöf while still in her teens.

Gunnar Orn Tynes significant presence on the record is felt through its programmed electronics and the digital manipulation of some of the instrumental parts – new elements that pushed Ólöf out of her comfort zone; for the first time she was writing, performing and recording simultaneously, musical ideas intuitively pieced together or picked apart as they went along.

The constant here, of course, is Ólöf’s effortlessly distinctive vocal. A voice ‘that can silence a room, such is its sweetness’ once opined a bowled over Time Out New York – and here on Palme it has never been so poignant nor powerfully intoxicating.

This show takes place in the Annexe of Cornerhouse, Manchester’s main cultural hub, situated on Oxford Road.

70 Oxford Street
Manchester
M1 5NH

www.heymanchester.com