Patricia Wolf :: Hrafnamynd (Balmat)

Patricia Wolf’s Hrafnamynd—her second LP for Balmat—melds ambient composition, field recordings, and empathic melody into a haunting, memory-soaked soundtrack whose warm synths, birdsong, and tape-worn textures mirror Edward Pack Davee’s raven-haunted Icelandic imagery and its meditation on collective and personal remembrance.

Memory, both collective and singular

Patricia Wolf’s Hrafnamynd, the Portland, Oregon-based ambient composer’s second LP for Balmat, is a fine recording. Mixing ambient music and field recording—including extensive experience documenting bird song—Wolf brings an unusually empathic perspective to her music. In the context of Hrafnamynd, her airy melodies, pensive atmospheres, and vivid textures intuitively complement the film’s grainy film stock and blown-out colors.

Largely created using the UDO Super 6 synthesizer, it features a carefully distilled palette of warm, string-like pads and darkly glistening mallets, rounded out with the very occasional introduction of nylon string guitar. Musically and stylistically, the album’s 11 tracks represent both a continuation of the ruminative sound of See-Through (Balmat, 2022)and also an extension into new expressive modes. Patricia Wolf‘s second Balmat album is the soundtrack to experimental filmmaker Edward Pack Davee‘s feature-length documentary Hrafnamynd, and mixes field recordings with AFX-esque lullaby themes, tape-mangled instrumental vamps and VHS-burn’d analog pads.

Released last year, the film Hrafnamynd, Icelandic for “raven film,” is framed through slides taken from the Davee family archives, featuring stills of his mother, father, brother, and himself, along with shots of Icelandic mountains, their Volkswagen Beetle, a whale slaughter, and birds—ravens especially. 

Known for their intelligence and hereditary memories, the raven has been celebrated by Indigenous cultures the world over as tricksters and heralds since time immemorial. It’s their hereditary memories and omnipresence in Iceland that captivated Davee—spurring he, Wolf, and the viewer into question memory, both collective and singular.

Hrafnamynd is available on Balmat. [Bandcamp]