Nabelóse – Haar (Trost, 2026)

By Dan Sorrells

Haar rolls in like a fog or a dream. Nabelóse—the duo of Ingrid Schmoliner and Elena Kakaliagou—finally return with their third album, recorded in 2022 in a studio perched on the edge of the Norwegian Sea. This locale—ocean spreading outward, mountains rising above—saturates the music. The music, in turn, has a way of seeping in. Both disorienting and soothing, Haar can be as intimate or uncanny as a whisper in the ear (quite literally in "Hinter Meinen Dünen"). At other times, it fully envelops you and you are held weightlessly in its allure.

Nabelóse has long had a talent for opening enchanted spaces with prepared piano, French horn, and increasingly, both women's voices. As with their earlier work, Schmoliner and Kakaliagou channel techniques honed through years as performers of improvised and contemporary music into the hoary realm of folklore and myth. Poems and old songs in multiple tongues are suspended within the duo's intricate sound fields. These are further extended on Haar through studio shaping and with the addition of guest musicians Bilgehan Ozis and Elys Vanderwyer on "Perfume" and "To Ke," respectively. Each song is an invocation, a rift that opens into a dreamspace where the unreal mingles with the perennial comforts of varied folk traditions. Crossing the threshold into one of these small worlds is, to borrow from one of the duo's earlier songs, "to be given up," if only for a few moments.

There's a playful, almost figurative sense to many of the tracks on Haar, even when the mood can be ambiguous. The album's three shorter tracks are intense—disquieting, even. "Niriides" layers dampened arpeggios beneath a recitation of the many daughters of Nereus from The Iliad, the turbulent piano like the vaporous bubbles of sea nymphs arriving from all directions. The stabbing martial chords and blatting horns of "Blue Mountains" depict the hubris of its protagonist, who, fooled by the birds about his immortality (we hear the cackling nightingales between verses hissed through the French horn), builds his house to tower over nature, only to see Death riding in from across the green plains.

For me, it's the two longer tracks that have soaked in the deepest. On "Perfume" and "To Ke," the duo create an atmosphere, a charged air that I imagine must share some quality with the enigmatic and animate world that kindled the allegories and ancestral folksongs that inspire them. "Perfume" could not conjure any more vividly the longing of its heartbroken narrator, perhaps sitting by the shore as the sun sets, caught in that pensive crossing of the great beauty of nature and a great pain of heart, Kakaliagou evoking the sounds of surf with her horn, her voice nearly breaking as she sings over Schmoliner's patient and melancholic chord progression. I do not need to understand the words—and in the case of lyrics in imagined languages like those in "To Ke," can never literally understand—to be moved by this music, to feel that affective pull, which is a set of sensibilities and intensities that Nabelóse ritually enact in their music-making. I feel my whole self humming along with it all: the hollowed ring of Vanderwyer's measured vibraphone; the buzz and thrum of Schmoliner's eBow-excited strings and the spectral partials in her overtone singing; the solemn force of Kakaliagou's wavering tones.