JFDR - MUSEUM (WHITE COLOURED) VINYL

Icelandic experimental singer-songwriter Jófríður Ákadóttir aka JFDR's latest album Museum is a timeless monument to captured moments. Its nine tracks sculpt fleeting instants of experience into emotional objects, her voice a glowing aura in a mist of glittering gossamer synths and delicate instrumentation.

"I'm always thinking about how you might capture the essence of a moment; a thought process; a feeling and a mood," she says, describing her songs as sculptures; like thoughts and experiences captured in song and laid down on record, a concept reflected in the album's artwork, where she is photographed in austere black and white, statuesque in a garment designed by Sól Hansdóttir.

Museum was made in an intense and nurturing period she found at the other side of an existential crisis about her own work in the aftermath of the release of her previous album, the acclaimed New Dreams. It was a landmark album in her already decades-long career, and once it was finished JFDR began to experience a dissolving of inspiration. However, she began to emerge from her creative stasis in late 2021, inspired by the discovery of ideas lost to time and demos of songs never finished while purging her computer of old files. "I found a moment where something was happening," she says. "I knew I had to write without over thinking anything, and work on it intensely." Almost instantly, she started writing and finishing songs and didn't stop. Just a short time later, JFDR had a reflective, hopeful, and immersive nine track album that had been conceived and composed with a whole new spate of energy. It is, she says, "an album about clearing and healing. Like breathing fresh strong air through your old self."

This renewal of purpose, in a world emerging from the pandemic, lends Museum a weightlessness and sense of movement, a lifting up, a reflection on what has passed, and an escape. The nine tracks move between opener (and first single) 'The Orchid's beautifully unfurling melodies and through the subtle percussions on 'Life Man', which propel the song upwards to soar like spring breezes. Tracks like 'Air Unfolding' gather hope in whorls of piano and synths, alongside instrumental breathers such as 'Flower Bridge' whose sympathetic textures shivers with the metallic sound of Icelandic Langspil – a traditional Icelandic string instrument. In the dream-like 'Valentine' JFDR sings as if conjuring a spirit, as her vocals curl like wisps of smoke around the heavy and resonant silhouettes of electric guitar and bass. There is redemption to be found by the end of the album, with the healing, lightness and hope offered by closing track 'Underneath The Sun', where singer and a guitar usher us gloriously toward the light at the end of the tunnel.