The theremin’s spooky, Soviet era-wail can conjure a panoply of vintage kitsch—lava lamps, The Twilight Zone, Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, awkward robots in black and white. From the groaning organ on Turnar’s opening track “Inni,” Hekla dispatches such stereotypes like a medieval henchwoman, asserting the mid-century instrument’s modernity and range. Since 2018’s Á, the Icelandic musician born Hekla Magnúsdóttir has put the instrument to thrillingly spectral ends, generating sounds as haunting as a tortured psyche. On her latest, Hekla plumbs the theremin’s weird, otherworldly depths, channeling a particularly contemporary bleakness that tethers it firmly to the 21st century.
Named for the rural French castle tower in which it was recorded, Turnar straddles ancient and hypermodern sounds. Album standout “Kyrrð” foregrounds organ pipes that might have been teleported straight from the Middle Ages, played expertly by fellow Icelander Kristján Hrannar. The theremin enters like a ghostly howl. Later, “Ólga” shudders with heavy bass and the warbling vibrato of Hekla’s electronic signature. We’re wandering towards a locked door; we’re hoisting our candle into the dark passage. What’s more psychedelic than the feeling of primal fear, or persistent unease?
Theremin has long been used to soundtrack the uncanny—from Hungarian composer Miklos Rózsa’s score for Hitchcock’s Spellbound to sci-fi films like The Day the Earth Stood Still—and Turnar continues in that tradition, building sweeping soundscapes that feel like odysseys. Album midpoint “Var” is a suitable climax for a horrifying discovery, throbbing bass layered under the theremin’s high keen and wordless vocals that sound like someone trapped inside a wall. It’s doomed and droning, a song to gird your loins or shatter your nerve.
But where other famous instances of the electromagnetic instrument have aged into camp, Hekla’s compositions feel more like the spiritual kin of Wendy Carlos’ score for The Shining, which somehow both transcends and emblematizes its time. The ahistorical mix of sounds—distortion and cello, theremin and sub-bass—takes us out of time, and the sense of menace doesn’t pussyfoot around. These songs are as apt to send a peasant into cardiac arrest as they are to amplify the effects of an ill-advised edible, and in these unflinching tracks, Hekla centers her instrument as a compositional pillar. The Theremin isn’t an accessory. It doesn’t add flourishes or goofy trills on Turnar—it’s the unifying force that joins many disparate parts, placed as intentionally as chess pieces on a board.
The century-old instrument may be an unlikely source of novel sensations, but dread is timeless, and darkness comes for us all. Hekla’s greatest sleight of hand is triangulating the theremin with so many unexpected sounds, channeling centuries of horror into a postmodern milieu. Depending on where you stand, her playing sounds like the Sunday night before a Monday morning meeting or the ride from a village into a plague-ridden city. It’s roiling and uneasy; it’s as mysterious as the human condition.
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