Ambient artist Patricia Wolf releases the soundtrack to the feature-length documentary ‘Hrafnamynd’ by experimental filmmaker Edward Pack Davee which achieved critical acclaim in its limited showings last year.
Icelandic for “raven film”, it features an unconventional autobiographical narrative where Edward Pack Davee looks back on his childhood living in Iceland. There are recorded conversations with his mother and father who was stationed in Iceland with the US Coast Guard, monitoring movements with “neighbouring” navigation transmitters in the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Newfoundland.
Illustrated by grainy archive home movies, Ektachrome slides and present day digital imaging, the film additionally has a touching subplot about a rescued talking raven named Krummi. With a wider commentary on the islands raven behaviour through fact and folklore, This in turn dictated the landscapes that were newly filmed to avoid the conventional tourist style of documentation and connects thematically to ‘The Secret Lives of Birds’, Wolf’s most recently released body of work.
Having worked with Davee previously in the filming of music videos for her tracks ‘The Culmination Of’ (from her debut album ‘I’ll Look For You In Others’) and ‘Woodland Encounter’ (from the follow-up ‘See-Through’), with her soft impressionistic atmospheres and airy melodies, Patricia Wolf was the natural choice for the soundtrack to ‘Hrafnamynd’. Indeed, her previous work had been used placeholder music as a guide to how he imagined the film to sound.
“This told me that he trusted my work and style and therefore I should just trust my intuition with how to proceed” she said, “I wanted to make sure that everything that I made was a direct reflection of what was happening on screen, a mirror of its emotion and energy so people could really lock into the film psychologically.”
Mixing her aptitude for ambient music and field recording with her experience in documenting bird song, Wolf has been able to further her Avian fascination and give an empathic perspective to accompany film of windswept birds flying in suspension and circling in the skies of Iceland’s picturesque locations. Her beautiful soundtrack complements additional footage of wildlife, pasturing sheep, volcanically formed landscapes, waterfalls, open waters and the Icelandic capital Reykjavík.
Largely created using the UDO Super 6, a 12 voice polyphonic binaural analog-hybrid synthesizer, it enabled Wolf to sound modern while also giving the emotive fuzzy tones that would correspond to the film’s timeline from the early 70s to today. A glassy ambience on ‘The Return To Iceland’ aurally focusses on the nightfall settling in while the gentle ringing calls of ‘Early Memories’ set the album’s scene, musically encapsulating wide open windy spaces as if the late Ryuichi Sakamoto was looking thoughtfully from above.
In its texturing, ‘Subconscious Familiarity’ offers a kind of cerebral awakening while
‘Hrafnaþing’ gets vibey and ‘Echoes Through Time‘ gets glitchy. Naturally, Krummi gets his own reverbed nylon strung ‘Theme’ alongside evocative titles such as ‘Reykjavík By The Sea’, ‘I Thought I Could Fly’ and ‘Surfing On Wind’ which capture the serene yet mysterious beauty of this remote Nordic island.
As with her wonderful work on ‘See-Through’, the electronic sound design, field recordings and occasional acoustic interventions provide a soothing backdrop. Does the music work without the visuals? Indeed it does and even without the film, there is the feeling of fresh breezy escapism throughout the 11 instrumental pieces that really lift the heart and soul.
‘Hrafnamynd’ is released on orange or black vinyl LP and digitally by Balmat, available from https://patriciawolf.bandcamp.com/album/hrafnamynd
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Text by Chi Ming Lai
11th July 2025
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