Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir's Where to From features nine emotional and introspective original works inspired by close bonds of friendship. Following her global breakthrough with the scores to Joker and the HBO miniseries Chernobyl, this is her first studio album for Deutsche Grammophon, yet it defies any feeling of grandeur. Instead, the record turns inwards.
Guðnadóttir created Where to From by recording musical fragments in her phone's voice recorder, reflecting her "constant stream of music." That origin determines the record's skeletal lucidity. Sparse strings, low drones, and meticulously preserved negative space do the bulk of the work, enabling tension to build rather than release.
The mood is subtly subdued, private, frigid, and introverted. It skips the cinematic expanse in favor of something more tactile and psychological, leaving the target audience suspended instead of directed. The album's overarching simplicity achieves a remarkable density.
“The original seeds were planted in my phone across six or seven years,” Hildur Guðnadóttir recalls. “After working on so many film soundtracks, it was interesting to take a completely different look at the way music comes to me. There’s a lot of space in the music that’s playing in my head, which I realised from listening to these phone recordings is the mind-space I would generally like to be in.”
ZR