Skuli Sverrisson. Seremonie.

SKULI SVERRISSON

CD Seremonie [Extreme], one of the most innovative electric bass offerings. In fact, you may not realize you're hearing electric bass. "I want to squeeze as many sounds out of it as possible," says Skuli, who is inspired by rock and jazz improvisers as well as academics such as John Cage. "When you include all of the harmonics, the electric bass is a wonderfully rich sound source with an incredible range. You can create vibrations by bowing, plucking, feedback, and striking the strings with a variety of objects."

Seremonie was many years in the making. Since his teens the Iceland native has been exploring electric-bass sounds and recording them in small units he calls cells, analogous to motion-picture frames. "I started isolating the intriguing bits and creating a library of cells," Skuli says. "It's not so much about manipulating with signal processing as it is isolating what the instrument already does. A cell can be a sustained harmonic, a combination of  pitches, or a rhythmic figure."

Seremonie, 1998

At times Sverrisson composes by expanding on a combination of several cells, and at other times he creates a structure first and then fits cells into it. Generally the  pieces unfold slowly and majestically, with broad, nearly orchestral textures and timbres. He does a  lot of overdubbing but creates all sounds on mainly plucked and EBow'd Curbow basses. He sometimes uses prepared bass—"Org" features a Curbow altered with alligator clips and played in real time—and for the gamelan effect on "The Rain Is Not a Metaphor" he struck strings with bells and other metal objects. His compositions can be rhythmic—the dissonant "Hymnodia" is in a slow nine—or he can avoid meter altogether, as he does in the choral-like "Crash Frozen." One piece, "Blind Spot," even employs the traditional melody-plus-accompaniment—though Skuli feels that format is worn out. "Sometimes I am inspired by a particular sound," he notes. "And sometimes it's not about adding things to your vocabulary but letting go of exhausted ideas."