Gabbarein- Gabbarein

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Hafstad and Bono first met in 2011 at a Shamanic sound-healing retreat in Vermont. “I was doing a three-year teacher training program with Vermont based Shaman Zacciah Blackburn” remembers Hafstad. “But other people could come in and join us for weekend retreats with focused themes.”

At the time Bono was studying and researching sound healing theories and practices for the ambient-orchestral work ‘Bardo’, his multi-media installation piece based on the Tibetan Book of The Dead and the Tarot system that was written as a requiem after the suicide of his childhood best friend. His studies had taken him to meet several Shamans and Mystics across many traditions, eventually leading to the indigenous shamanic studies of Zacciah.

“In that two-year research period, I studied sound healing diligently,” says Bono. “I wanted to integrate the rich esoteric ideas that threaded across ancient cultures as the thematic base of the orchestral structure I was working on for ‘Bardo’. I started looking into all like the great sound healing people in the country, and a lot of them happen to be in the Northeast of the United States.”

“Christopher and I were put together in a group,” says Hafstad, “and we were supposed to do sound healing on each other as a group of four. That’s really when the connection between us started. There was an incredibly intense energy that permeated the space in that ritual, it was extremely profound.”

After that initial meeting, the pair kept in touch, eventually reconnecting two years later. Cecilie ended up moving to the Hudson Valley to help manage Sage Academy of Sound in Woodstock, NY, and soon after the two began doing regular sound rituals, exploring sound bath meditations together, along with far out chanting and toning with their voices accompanied by various instruments.

“I had been exploring sound and meditation for several years at that point. To be honest, in the privacy of experimentation my ideas were pretty weird and wild, I was way too shy to perform that way in front of anyone else, but when Cecilie and I began jamming together with Crystal Bowls, Tibetan bowls, Drums, Percussion and Gongs I found the two of us would really dig deep into our subconscious and pull out incredible primal energy. It was an extremely fresh experience which built a special relationship between us forged in sound.”

Cecilie also began helping Christopher run his record label Our Silent Canvas. At first, she helped with general administration and assistance, but when Christopher developed the idea for the first version of the large-scale improvisational ensemble NOUS, he asked Cecilie if she would manage the weeklong recording and performance project. Cecilie soon agreed.

“I came up with the NOUS project towards the end of finishing the Bardo recording,” says Bono. “I had spent three years doing a very isolated and intense compositional piece. The project culminated in a multimedia performance at the Ann Hamilton Tower in Sedona, CA and then a recording with the Prague FILMharmonic in the Czech Republic. All that time my mind was tied to manuscript paper and a computer, this process led to a deep desire to just be with other humans making music in the present moment. So, I designed the NOUS project to explore improvisational music along with some of the esoteric sound practices I had learned about during the Bardo research. It made perfect sense for Cecilie to manage it. This first version of NOUS in 2014 was a week-long recording session with two performances at the end, one at the Basilica Hudson in Hudson, NY, the other at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn. It had about 25 people involved and ended up being a stressful and complex production to pull off. Cecilie was the only other person who was really deep in the emotional weeds with me.”

NOUS saw Bono curating a varied group of musicians from the experimental rock and contemporary classical scenes, as well as others deeply immersed in sound healing practices for five days of recording at Dreamland, a studio in a converted church in Woodstock, in January 2014. To date, four albums from the 2014 NOUS sessions have been released – ‘NOUS I: A Musical Rite’ (2018), ‘NOUS II’ (2019), ‘NOUS III’ (2020) and ‘Circle Of Celebration’ (2021), a final release in collaboration with Laraaji and Arji OceanAnda.  Hafstad’s vocals can be heard across these documents of the NOUS Dreamland sessions, and she also appeared at NOUS’ live concerts.

Though the NOUS sessions yielded uniquely exceptional music, the sessions were physically intense and both mentally and emotionally exhausting.

“After we completed that project, I found myself in a bit of an existential crisis,” admits Bono. “NOUS really ripped me apart in many ways. Going through the various problems that arose in the NOUS sessions so closely with Cecilie meant there was a bond of trust formed through suffering the intensity together,” he says. “I really came to feel that I knew this person's heart. She was there for me and supportive in every way, and it was a great personal blessing I would not forget. A deep level of appreciation always lingered in my mind from the support she offered and the positivity she constantly showed up with.”

After the dust settled around NOUS, Bono began turning his attention back to his experimental rock project Ghost Against Ghost. The project had been sidelined for several years after becoming immersed in the contemporary classical scene, but he was very happy to turn his focus back to a vision he had begun sculpting as early as 2007. Over the years he had been unable to finish two different double length concept albums for the project, but when some personal trauma hit his family in late 2014, he found solace in art by processing the grief through writing the material that became still love, the first of the Ghost Against Ghost albums to have been fully realized and released.

“I was certain I wanted to have female singers on the album,” says Bono. “I imagined soaring and dense choral parts featuring female backing vocals. In my head, it would be like 70’s Pink Floyd but with a more operatic flavor.” He called four singers for the Choral Ensemble, Jamie Rae, an NYC singer songwriter and pop artist that is the soloist on the record, his sister Stacie Bono, a Broadway vocalist, Michele Kennedy a classical Opera Singer he had worked with on some of his Choral works years before, and finally Cecilie.

He ended up recording Cecile on various tracks, primarily in the female choral sections that had been specifically written out. However, the roots of the Gabberein project can, in many ways, be traced back to their work together on the still love album’s closing track, ‘Guerison’.

“Toward the end of the recording of that piece, I suggested she improvise her singing,” Bono recalls. “Before she had been singing down my written parts, and her performances were fine but did not stand out within the context of the more trained singers. But, when I asked her to open up and just be herself it was striking what came out in that recording session. There’s this way she sings with her Norwegian-Scandinavian style, it’s distinctly Her in just a wonderful way. Before that, we had frequently gotten together and did sound meditations in my old house. We would do these open shamanic jam sessions quite a lot. Cecilie always managed to go to a place where it got really beautiful and then it'd be crazy, and then it would just be all over. So, I already knew, on one level, how great her voice was, but I think it was stepping back in the studio while editing ‘Guerison’ that it really struck me that something really special was in her.”

“I really like to improvise, or to channel,” explains Hafstad. “Whatever comes through, comes through. I don't really know what I'm doing in the moment. I definitely tuned into something when I was with Christopher that afternoon recording ‘Guerison’. It was just before I was moving back to Norway. I’d lived in the States for 16 years, and then I was going back to Oslo.”

Bono spent 2017 converting an old barn in the Hudson Valley into the new Our Silent Canvas label’s studio. It was an arduous and exhausting process that took the best part of a year. When finally nearing the end of the construction he was on a call with his dear friend and collaborator Gareth Jones, who suggested they consecrate the barn with a new recording project which they entitled Nous Alpha. Their first album, ‘Without Falsehood’, was such a joyful collaborative experience that Bono, full of pent-up creative energy from being tethered to construction work for a year, was inspired to design and curate a series of collaborative projects in 2018. Gabbarein is the first release from a series of four special Our Silent Canvas projects from that year.

“Christopher called me up not long after I’d moved back to Oslo,” says Hafstad “He said, ‘I want to go to the Arctic Circle and record with you!’ And I'm like, “Yeah, Christopher! Just pack your shit and come up, we'll rent some place and do it.’”

Using two suitcases of gear and instruments Christopher managed to lug across the Atlantic Ocean, and with an assortment of Cecilie’s own sound makers, the duo along with Bono’s Wife Karina rented a small house perched on the edge of a fjord in one of Norway’s northernmost locations. For one week in June 2018, that small cottage would be the base for what became the ‘Gabberein’ sessions.

“My intention with the production from the outset was to frame Cecilie’s voice like a visual work of art,” says Bono. “I wanted to create a landscape solely to support the exploration of her voice. My primary projects involve writing and singing my own work, so framing someone’s else’s voice was never something I was inspired to do. But with Cecilie it was different, as I cared about her like a sister. After recording her on the end of Ghost Against Ghost’s Guerison by just letting her follow her own intuitions, I came to love the sensitivity, soul, and tone of her Scandinavian inflections. Heading into the Lyngen sessions, my intention was really compelled by complete generosity directed to allowing her heart to flow out into the small space and capture it with a single microphone. Apart from that, it was a totally blank slate.  It could have been anything. The only thing that was important was that Cecilie and I were doing a project together, in that magical place and space.”

Though Hafstad thinks of herself as someone who doesn’t overthink things, a sense of nervousness crept in as she and Bono began the first day’s sessions. “I felt a lot of pressure,” she admits. “I knew they’d traveled so far. Christopher is a very busy man and one of the best musicians I've ever met in my life, but he was taking this time to work with me. We’re great friends, but it was definitely nerve wracking at the start. That first day got a little tense, as we were trying to find our way, with all the personal pressure I felt, and in the afternoon, we had the only argument of the session.”

The pressure and tension of the first day would, however, lead to two things that became central defining characteristics of the whole week. “On that first morning, when it wasn’t quite working, we went outside to do some samples,” remembers Hafstad. “We sampled all kinds of nature sounds. I walked into the forest for a little bit, and I found this clump of white fur. I didn't think about it too much, but then later, when it was sunset over this amazing landscape, there was a white reindeer on the rocky beach. She stayed with us near the cottage the whole time we were there. She had wounded her foot. Every morning after that, she would greet me out there and I would sing to her. Her spirit really helped strengthen my ability to do this, to be free in this setting and just let it all go. I feel it was meant to be and she was supposed to be there for us. It was so necessary to have that argument.”

The totemic arrival of the white reindeer tapped deep into the culture of the Sámi people native to areas of what are now parts of Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia. Later in the week, Hafstad and Bono recorded a local singer in a bid to add Sámi voices to the album. During the sessions the vocalist reminded Hafstad of the importance of the white reindeer to Sámi people and the mythology of the Gabberein. “It means ‘white reindeer’ in the Sámi language,” explains Hafstad. “The reindeer are extremely important to the Sámi people who rely on them for food, travel, and spiritual rituals. So, when they see an all-white reindeer, it is something very rare. It’s extremely important for them. We decided to call the project “Gabberein” with reverence to the reindeer’s presence.”

The other pivotal moment of that first day came when Hafstad began singing. “I started with a couple of English words,” she remembers. “Christopher was like, ‘No, no, no, no, no – you're not singing any English here in your own country.’ I've been an artist for a while, and I've been doing music for a while, but I've never sung one lyric in Norwegian in my life. Christopher really pushed me to sing in my native language, and that was really empowering for me, in those amazing natural surroundings.”

 The location was also crucial for Bono, but for more elemental reasons. “You’ve never known anything in the world outside of your senses,” he offers. “There's nothing that you've ever experienced in your entire life outside of what’s gone through your eyes, your ears, your nose, your scent, tactile sensations, and finally your internal “thinking” sense. For us, in that room in Lyngen, we’re breathing the Norwegian air, receiving the light in our eyes, hearing the sounds, eating the food, and drinking the water from the area. The electrons from all those local atoms are transferring into our current atomic structure and becoming our bodies in that present moment. We set up the recording in the living room, staring out this giant window onto this gorgeous mountain arising out of a fjord waterway. We were literally right at the water's edge. Then, as we were improvising, we just tuned into a vibe as we stared out at to this view. There’s no question about it, all those sensory inputs channeling into our bodies in the moment became totally integrated into the creative output that emerged in the sessions. That's why setting is so important. This album would never have existed in the same way without that setting.”

Singing in Norwegian allowed Hafstad to channel something deeply personal in the sessions.

“Some of the songs are about nature,” she explains. “I’m literally singing about the nature that I'm seeing. ‘Lyngen’, a song we called the water toning track, is really about that: I'm looking at the mountain tops and the waterfall coming down and the cows and the reindeer grazing. All this was going into what I was singing and helping to channel the music coming through.”

“With some of the other songs, I'm telling a personal story, “She continues. “In the moment, the lyrics were just emerging from my past. When I listened to the tracks two years after the sessions, I had forgotten I had sung about past relationships. There are some pieces about my two marriages, especially my first marriage when I was very young, all this unexpectedly just arose in the moment. I remember on a couple tracks I was crying deeply while singing. One was about a dear friend of mine, who died when I was 12, on another (‘Mamma’) I was channeling thoughts and memories of my mother. So, it became a very, very personal album for me, though I never had this in mind going into the project.”

For Bono, who doesn’t speak Norwegian, it meant that his musical accompaniments needed to act as a scaffold for themes that he could only respond to through observing Hafstad’s emotions. “It was all improvised live, together in that moment,” he says. “I would be playing synth, mandolin, Kalimba guitar or something else, while Cecilie would be singing, always together.  Before we pressed the record button, there were no ideas, no melodies, harmonies, lyrics, nothing to lead us. It was just a blank, silent canvas. I was improvising the harmonic and structural form as a bed for Cecilie to sing over, while simultaneously her melodies suggested texture and harmonic direction, it all arose in complete simultaneous interdependence.”

“As the producer, my entire approach was based solely on the emotional feeling, without any knowledge whatsoever of meaning or vernacular,” he continues. “The arrangements existed to amplify the feeling. As I started to try to sculpt the material in the studio, I had no choice but to be guided by the emotion of each track, as I had no idea what the track was about, we never discussed meaning at all!” Other elements were added in by Bono during post-production, including gong sounds recorded at Hafstad’s Oslo apartment the night before they travelled to Lyngen, the nature samples from their first day, and other instruments including synths, guitars, flute, and violin.

Across Gabberein there is a conscious sense of sparseness within the musical accompaniment. “Throughout the process, I always kept the original intention of framing Cecilie’s voice in Mind,” says Bono. “I literally imagined a picture frame in front of me as I tuned into the stereo spectrum. Cecilie has a beautifully distinct natural voice, and like a flower, or a still life, I similarly envisioned her voice. The background and boundaries were designed to support the dimensionality of her voice. I aspired to this before, during and after the sessions. I truly saw it like a classical painter would approach a visual piece of art. I consistently came back to this. For instance, when I was trying to cut length down or smooth back certain things I would sit there and go, ‘Okay, is this framing her voice?’ and then, if it felt it wasn't, I adjusted. A lot of the music is quite empty and bare because of that intention.”

Most of the tracks have a calming and transcendent aura. However, some channel an ancient Scandinavian intensity. One exception is the track ‘Jeg Hører Deg’ (‘I Hear You’). “That one is more aggressive,” says Hafstad. “Christopher brought a lot of guitars to the track. It’s about my divorce from my first husband. Singing on it really was so cathartic. Finally, I said it, and finally I got the aggression out. I divorced him when I was in my late 20s and after all this time my feelings finally came out when I was working with Christopher.”

Many things coalesced to allow Gabberein to evolve into the album it became – the sublime arctic setting of Norway’s Northern Territory, the mystical appearance of the White Reindeer, the cathartic power of unearthing deeply buried emotions – but the bond between Hafstad and Bono was undoubtedly the basic grounding force. “Our friendship has built over many years, and the trust is so strong,” says Hafstad. “That means you're allowed to let yourself go. That means you can trust yourself. I trust Christopher, and I trusted myself to do what I created with him. That trust, and that friendship, was completely necessary. It is what made the creation of this album so special. The whole thing was a truly magical experience,” she concludes.