Hild Sofie Tafjord is an experimental musician that has been around quite a bit. She performed as Fe-Mail together with Maja Ratkje, who formed Trincaria together with the metal band Enslaved. She worked with Birchville Cat Motel, Wolf Eyes, Matmos, Zeena Parkins, Fred Frith and many others. Her work can be found on records from labels with interests as far apart as ECM and Gameboy and Rune Grammofon. And most of all, next to some other things, her main instrument is the french horn and she uses it to explore completely new and unsailed waters on the landscape of this instrument. She extracts, manipulates, condenses and inflates the sounds of the french horn until its origin is lost and new, exciting sounds come up. It seems as if she is also using all kinds of contact mics to record the sound of the instrument itself as well as the soundwaves when it is being played. She expands the vision of the french horn to a new width.

“kama” is one long, single piece of music Tafjord recorded from 2006 to 2007 and it spans a wide range of droning noise to droning noise. My favorite parts are those with some low and subtle crackling noises and longwinding, melancholic, sort of metallic sounding horn sounds lay over that. Like a ship gently floating through slowly freezing passages in the north. Sometimes subtle pulses arise and fascinatingly add a very human warmth to the piece. At various parts there are dynamic and sometimes even chaotic shifts, harsh noises breaking through or just a rising level of distortion. Sometimes Tafjord shifts layers on top of more layers to produce an ever more interesting trip down and back to more simple areas. It is hard for me to get to grips with the structure of “kama” because magically its form seems to shift everytime I hear it. And since I am completely averse to the idea of taking notes while listening to music, I am stuck with the simple impression of a very moving and always shifting work of art and the only thing I can say for sure is, that it seems to be getting a lot louder towards the end.

All in all “kama” is a very fascinating piece of music. It is in some respects old school fringe noise, but it is also very refined and special, and if you let it, it is able to shake you. The more subtle and sublime noises in the beginning open up the doors and pathways for your subconscious to step out into the light. While the harsher and more massive noise at the end will induce a slight dose of paranoia into your vision and you’ll be turning around checking for movements when you know perfectly well that there is no one else here but you. Effective in all respects.