MAY 10, 2019. KRUNK / VINYL FACTORY.

Troubled by environmental injustices playing out in the oceans – affecting human and more-than-human lives – Jónsi (sound artist, chanteur and member of Sigur Rós, living in Los Angeles) and Carl Michael von Hausswolff (visual artist, electro-acoustic composer and King of Vargaland, living in Stockholm) have teamed up for a one-off collaboration as Dark Morph.

The project came to life last summer onboard the research vessel Dardanella in the seas around Fiji, where hydrophone and field recordings made by the pair were sampled and manipulated during a trip driven by artistic exchange and collaboration.

Jónsi and Carl Michael recorded humpback whales in Tonga, bats in Fiji and the strange murmurations of shrimps in the waters between – as well as the eponymous ‘dark morph’ heron of the islands. Assembled and mixed in Jamaica this January, the project will now be released as the self-titled ‘Dark Morph’ as a digital album (via Sigur Rós’s imprint Krunk) and an vinyl album (via The Vinyl Factory) on May 10, 2019.

“While we were on the boat I started to take the recordings, manipulate them and mutate them into drones or other types of musical functions—so we could use the sounds as instruments for building compositions. We decided, ‘Let’s try not to have them sounding too much like real sounds, let’s turn them into something else.’ When I had done some drones, some long tones out of a bird or something, I gave it to Jónsi and he started to peel off certain types of melodious things, and then play it to me. And then we started to just throw the ball back and forth,” explains von Hausswolff.