PIINA
I have released new music, my first solo to be precise. My compostition PIINA delves into what pain is and how it seeks to communicate with us. My mission is to listen, translate, and give pain a voice.
All photos: Violetta Ellisdottir
The word pina means torment. It entails physical pain, but not like the temporary Hurt of a stubbed toe – it is the slow, ever-growing agony of constant distress and discomfort. It is chronic and devious: its location can be difficult to pinpoint, its origin hard to trace - difficult to treat, seemingly impossible to beat.
Pina also entails emotional pain, like deep grief or longing. It is those constant disruptive thoughts, the restlessness and noise, stress and overwhelm, festering like chronic pain in both the mind and body.
This Pina comes from within, and I believe it’s our body’s language.
Physical and emotional pain is a language that I’ve spent most of my life trying to decipher and translate. In the works of PIINA I am naked. It is solely my expression, from the first to the last tone. In an act of unapologetic rebellion I play around with the music.
PIINA explores the tension and fragile balance between pleasure and pain, where pain often defines our boundaries of both existence and self-discovery. While pleasure is fleeting and elusive, pain persists and transforms us.
PIINA is also an exploration of atonement. Traditionally, atonement (in Norwegian Å gjøre bot) is seen as an act of penance or punishment, where one repents or repays a debt to another, a higher power or some dogmatic moral force. I want to challenge this notion.
Rather than repenting or submitting to an authority or higher power that seeks to punish through suffering, PIINA asks: What if atonement is not about appeasing external forces but reconciling with oneself?
Musical description
PIINA is progressive, composed with smooth shifts between major and minor, changing between different keys, rhythms and melodies. PIINA sounds regal and shimmering, yet the vocals rarely harmonize in whole notes. This is deliberate, as whole note harmonies often belong to musical traditions that promote puritanism. The tonation in PIINA derives from Scandinavian and Eastern folk music, and is accompanied with a rhythm and wind instrument from the Trøndelag region in Norway.
PIINA is all of me, but not all at once, as there is more to come in this symphonic stream of thoughts. I am currently recording score two, PIINADEAUX (pronounced “pinadø” in Norwegian) where I will dive further into the bodies experience of pain.
Instrumentation
The Lurk and resonance box
The lurk is a rhythm instrument made of a long wooden stick with a sturdy Beksøm shoe attached to one end. It is played by striking the shoe down into a low resonance box, creating a deep, percussive sound.
The resonance box for this lurk is no ordinary box; it’s made from an old cellar hatch from our farm, and it has a history of its own. During World War II, German soldiers occupied our farm. The farmer, who lived with the soldiers, hid his booze in the fraukjeller (a cellar for animal droppings) to keep it safe.
One day, a soldier sneaked down there to steal it. The farmer, waiting until the soldier was climbing back up the ladder, slammed the hatch hard on the soldiers head. He didn’t mean to kill him, but a rusty nail sticking out of the hatch caused a nasty cut that later got infected. The soldier died.
The soldier - embarrassed by his actions of theft - never reported what really happened, and the farmer was never punished. The beksøm shoe on the lurk belonged to this very farmer, and his shoe thumps the rythm of PIINA.
The Fælg
The Fælg is a wind instrument. It´s long mouthpiece is made from dried-out, hollow moose bone, the krakkel is made from an old man’s door stopper, and the pipe is assembled from spare plumbing joints. The fælg used in PIINA is made to resemple the sound of my pet duck Laila, as she joins in as the Fool. Crafting fælger is a skill that runs in Ingrid’s family. Her grandfather was a renowned fælgmaker, and she apprenticed under him.
