Myrmyr – Fire Star

Myrmyr is an Oakland, California based two piece headed by Marielle Jakobsons and Agnes Szelag, who met while studying music in college. Following their highly praised debut The Amber Sea, released on Digitalis in 2009, the pair have built a strong following with their own perspective on engaging ambient/experimental music…

Fire Star was recorded at Shasta Mountain in the Spring of last year and the album’s six tracks contain elements which hint at Jakobsons’ and Szelag’s shared Baltic ancestry, while still retaining a firmly West Coast flavour. The album articulates many moods, often within one particular piece and the exploration found in opening three tracks Hot Snow 1, 2 and 3 continues throughout the latter half of Fire Star, mixing ambience, subtle synths and acoustic instruments. At turns melancholic, playful, complex and for some brief moments even almost childishly simple, Jakobsons and Szelag’s songwriting strengths seem to bounce off each other, driving the album onward as each artist provides a counterpoint to the other, giving the necessary spark to inspire music of a rare calibre. Granted, eclectic may be a word overused to cliche, but it does indeed define Myrmyr better than any other.

The fine musicianship of Jakobsons and Szelag is apparent throughout Fire Star, both in what they play and what they do not; At no point does the album lose cohesion, nor does it repeat itself and the pair show a keen talent for arrangement, such as on Fire Serpent’s Tail – the piece beginning with plaintive strings, slow and deliberate, with an accompanying silence. Rather than fill in this silence however, Myrmyr turn the void into an instrument of its own and as the track builds to a moving climax, its inherent frailty is that much more pronounced.

Surely tipped to widespread recognition in the coming months, Myrmyr have improved from their already excellent debut to produce a stirring work of frailty and beauty in Fire Star and one would be well advised to procure a copy before word gets out just how good this album is.

Fire Star is released by Under The Spire in limited CD and 12” vinyl + included CD editions.

- Adam Williams for Fluid Radio

www.myrmyr.net
www.underthespire.co.uk