Runhild Gammelsaeter’s first musical adventure was when she joined Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson’s Thorr’s Hammer in the mid-90s. She was just 17 at the time and according to my good friend wiki was a foreign exchange student from Norway. How she came into contact with the madmen in question and went on to take part in the brain melting Thorr’s Hammer is probably a great story but I don’t know it. She did turn up again a couple of years ago with James Plotkin in his equally demented folk-noise ambient project Khlyst with her schizophrenic and completely bizarre vocal contributions.

So, two years on from Khlyst’s Chaos is My Name, Runhild is back with her first solo offering. Amplicon is expectedly weird using ambience for the large part and Runhild’s voice as the main instrument. There are no songs here in the traditional sense but I’m not sure what else to call them without sounding pretentious. Opening song Collapse – Lifting the Veil sets the tone with the same two lines repeated by Runhild in a soft folk voice that’s almost gentle and inviting and growled in bestial style with an ambient background and the eventual coming together of the two as both vocal styles overlap, mutate into a completely different beast altogether and yet somehow manages to retain a calmness at its core that is both breathtakingly bizarre and beautiful. The general format for much of this album is the same although the intensity and sheer ferocity of the delivery eases up and steadily reduces till the ambient ending to the album.

The music is mostly ambient and goes from harsh noise passages to gentle background swirls of drones, the occasional guitar parts both acoustic and electric and a feel and atmosphere of carnival music that manages to sound eerie and otherworldly.

While it is without a doubt, Gammelsaeter’s voice that is the sole focus here, the music (or non-music) as it is defined is a bit more accessible and friendly than the usual projects that she’s been associated with. There’s a sense here of complete and wild vocal improvisation that was then very carefully mixed together to make the album sound reasonably coherent.

This is challenging stuff and a liking for her earlier work in Khlyst and in Thorr’s Hammer is no guarantee that you’ll like this but if you like the free form vocal improvisations of the likes of Diamanda Galas and Jarboe then chances are you just might find something to like here.



Label - Utech
Year of Release - 2008