Icelandic sisters Jófríõur Ákadóttir & Ásthildur, AKA Pascal Pinon announce news of their new album ‘Sundur’, due August 26th via Morr Music. The duo are sharing a first slice of their intimate, minimal folk-sounds with lead single ‘53’.

Speaking about the heartbreaking '53' track, Jófríõur shed some light when she said "53 was written the summer of 2012. I was in the east of Iceland, it was early morning after this art festival I was playing at, we'd had a late night and were so drained, completely empty and so receptive and vulnerable to emotions.

I had met this boy there, I hardly knew him but we went for a walk around the town. We walked to a church, which happened to be open so we sat down and started talking about life and death as if we'd known each other for years and years. The boy told us about his mother and how she had passed away when he was just a kid. She had suffered from mental illness and jumped out of a window. When I got home I kept thinking about it, it had such an impact on me. I was beginning to understand that people don't live forever. I wished there was something I could say to him but I didn't know how, so I put together this song, as a kind of consolation or a message to him."

Pascal Pinon's third album is the Icelandic duo's rawest and most diverse musical statement yet. Produced only by themselves, Sundur comprises material written over the course of 1 ½ years. While most parts of the album are sparsely orchestrated and follow the experimental lo-fi-leaning aesthetics of the duo's previous two records, the overall tone has become more intimate with its metronome-like rhythms, occasional synth lines and driving piano melodies. 

Sundur lends its title from the Icelandic proverb "sundur og saman" (meaning "apart and together") and could be considered the companion of 2013's Twosomeness. Thematically, it reflects upon the voluntary separation of the two sisters. "We had never been apart our entire lives until we finished touring with our last album", remembers Jófríður Ákadóttir. While Ásthildur went to Amsterdam to study classical piano and composition and back to Iceland, her sister Jófríður went to tour the world with her other band, Samaris, and still leads a nomadic lifestyle.

Being apart is not only the main thematic thread running through Sundur, it also turned Pascal Pinon's writing process upside down. Although Ásthildur and Jófríður frequently visited each other in the Netherlands and respectively Iceland from early 2014 until late 2015 to finish the writing process, the geographical separation also influenced their compositions and thus the album as a whole. "The fact that we spent so much time apart creates completely different connections between the songs than on Twosomeness, which for me makes it more diverse in the best way possible", says Ásthildur in regards to the LP's predecessor. Indeed "Sundur" sees two different people arriving at their shared creative goal. 

Due to a conflict of schedules, Ásthildur and Jófríður ended up recording the bulk of Sundur in only two days. Their father, composer Áki Ásgeirsson, helped out with the engineering and contributed percussions played with scrap metal he brought with him, including discarded parts of airplanes. While few of those details will be audible on the surface, the unpolished sound design and added bits are crucial to Sundur, the result of an intense musical collaboration between the three family members. "It makes the album feel more real and raw which is what it essentially is all about," explains Jófríður. "It's very sparse and a lot closer in the approach and in regards to the sound of our very first album. It's kind of funny that seven years later, we would go back to the same place where we were at age 14!" Here they are however, with a record which is as intimate as it is mature.

‘Sundur’ track list: 

1. Jósa & Lotta
2. 53
3. Forest
4. Skammdegi
5. Fuglar
6. Spider Light
7. Orange
8. Twax
9. Babies
10. Ást
11. Weeks

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Listen to '53' here