Ingri Høyland & Ida Urd – An emotional soundscape of the fluttering fears that compel us to rest
Ingri Høyland & Ida Urd – “Duvet” (Balmat, 2025) – review by Macon Holt
Duvet, the new album from Ingri Høyland and Ida Urd, explore the eerie tensions that run through the desire for rest and solitude. Høyland has been an increasingly well-regarded composer in the Copenhagen scene for a number of years. Her work contains a great deal of variety, including her sultry art pop project Hôy La, soundtrack work for short films, and her acclaimed experimental piece of audio new materialism, the 2023 album, Ode to Stone. Urd is a sought-after bassist and composer of the bass and vocal-driven album, Future Woman Am Pm. Urd also featured heavily on Ode to Stone and frequently performed the album live with Høyland. However, their new album is the first attributed to the two long-time collaborators together.
Having seen them perform Ode to Stone live together and experienced the enrichening explorations that came through these performances, the prospect of listening to an album that they composed together was exciting. Indeed, their new album bears some resemblance to Ode to Stone but in responding to a very different subject, its sonic qualities chart their own new route. A route that took me as a listener through a paradox of feeling lonely while craving solitude, seeking comfort in an environment that is indifferent to my comfort, as it is beautiful, and the way your problems follow you, no matter where you go.
From national parks to summer houses
Where Ode to Stone was commissioned to sonically explore the vitas of Denmark’s national parks, Duvet sees the duet turning this earlier prompt inwards to investigate the refuge of the summer house in the depths of winter and the emotional landscapes of those who dwell within it. The result is a texturally compelling work of ambient music with sounds derived from synths, acoustic instruments, and other assorted gear, all run through the material instability of a tape mixer. As the album’s title suggests (a duvet being called a comforter in US English), the tracks are an exploration of a drive for comfort, rest and sanctuary in an environment that is as cold and hostile as it is beautiful and inspiring.
Danish summer houses are a means of escaping during the warmer months, though they can lack sufficient insulation in winter. While in much of the world the idea of having access to a summer house suggests a certain status, in this corner of Northern Europe, it is quite a normal thing. The structure of life these houses reflect, while often presented as one of work/life balance, can also be seen as a way of living that creates a demand for escape. In this way, the conceptual switch at the heart of the album, from a focus on the landscape to the emotional reservoir of the people who desire something they can appraise as a landscape, is important.
The richness of the sounds and their nested arrangements on this record criss-cross the tracks with countless emotional micro-narratives.
On the album’s title track, for example, the fragmented and popping beats set against bass figures that announce musical forms that fade out before they start carry with them the memories of tensions that could cause one to seek refuge in the first place. As the track ends, this dissipates more and more, as if exhaling with the hope that escape is possible. But as the subsequent track “Peaches” begins, the palpitations return with what sounds like a slapped bass serving a muted kick at the rate of a panicked heartbeat. And yet this is made to fade as a synth pad seems slowly to extract the terror from the insensate rumbling.
This opens up for “Woe”, a track named with an archaic word for great sorrow, which is built around a looped sample that sounds like a fragment of the earliest recorded sound; a texture familiar to listeners of Lowercase, a genre of ambient music known for its exploration of the textures that emerge from sounds on the edge of silence once they are amplified to the extreme. Placing myself in the sonic space Høyland and Urd have made, it is as if, in the evaporation of the stress that has led me to seek refuge, there is now space for painful memories to emerge more tolerably. What has been hard to bear can now be born, felt in all its sadness, without crushing the bearer. And with this newfound capacity, as I hear the delicately hummed vocals on “Nest” – mixed so close to the synthetic sounds as to be partially submerged in them – it feels like regaining something of myself.
Many layers of micro-narratives
The richness of the sounds and their nested arrangements on this record criss-cross the tracks with countless emotional micro-narratives. Some listeners may find the grandeur of the natural environment in the harmonic density of the records, shimmering washes. Others may find a deeply implicit social critique in the formal tensions of the arrangements. While others may catch the narrative that captures those momentary flutters of fear that emerge in seclusion and dissolve seconds later in the peace of being alone together.
Duvet, then, is a record that, for all its obvious longing for rest, peace, sanctuary and collective nesting, carries with it the melancholy of a world that makes these things both difficult to find or build while it makes them deeply necessary. By switching the focus from the landscapes as a romantic site of healing to the complex interiority of those who seek them out, Høyland and Urd have uncovered something of the complex and troubling relationships many of us have to each other and ourselves that drive us, or those of us who can, to retreat to the summer house.
Info: Duvet is out today on Balmat.
