Eyvind Kang’s “The Story of Iceland” plays just like one might expect something as eclectic as an avant-garde musical rendition of an island nation’s mythological past would. It builds up slowly, broodingly over a series of instrumental, long-winded tracks and draws on Kang’s abilities with the perhaps unusually paired violin and tuba (playing the latter because he arrived late for his first music lessons at school as a youth, and all the other instruments were already taken). With first-hand experience from the country - his mother came from Iceland, Kang lived there when he was younger, and Icelandic was his first language - he translates the loneliness of the place as one might imagine it without ever even having seen the country and packaging it all neatly into a very minimalistic record, without any extra aural “fluff”.

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