Off the Beaten Track #6: My Blood is Gold by Myrkur

The cover of Spine, from which My Blood is Gold is taken.

The Danish composer, vocalist and classically trained multi-instrumentalist, Amalie Bruun, released her debut album under her own name in 2006. In 2011 she formed the indie pop band Ex Cops, a duo, with Brian Harding. The band split in 2014, and she started to release music under the name Myrkur, Icelandic for darkness. At first she tried to release her music anonymously, and her first EP was simply called Myrkur (2014). When a fan guessed her identity, she decided there was no point hiding. Her first album M (2015) was an amalgam of influences, including black metal and Scandinavian folk. Her second album Mareridt (‘Nightmares’) released in 2017 was even more diverse in style, veering towards gothic folk rather than black metal. In 2020 she released Folkesange, inspired by the success of a YouTube video she made for the Swedish folk song Två Konungabarn (‘Children of the Kings’), on which she plays the nyckelharpa (a keyed fiddle that produces drone sounds) which almost disappeared from music in the UK until it was rediscovered by the likes of the late early music specialist Clare Salaman.

Folkesange features new arrangements of Scandinavian folk songs, and new songs written by Bruun, played by her on various traditional instruments including the mandola and lyre, both of which are stringed instruments. It was followed in late 2023 by her latest album, Spine which combines many of the styles of previous albums into a sophisticated whole, graced by her remarkably versatile voice.

Myrkur – image by Gobinder Jhitta

Spine explores various themes from Bruun’s personal life. When she was making her previous album she fell pregnant, and the new album reflects her hopes and fears for motherhood. The idea of a spine that provides the title and front cover came to her during a scan when she could see her baby’s spine starting to grow. She realised, as she told New Noise Magazine, that she was making a spine for her baby, ‘He’s just coming into the world, and the fact that I was making that for someone else, this is so alien yet human.’ Hence the metal spine on the cover.

But the song ‘Blood is Gold’ is a product of another major life event; the death of her beloved father, Michael Bruun, in 2021. Other prog artists have been deeply affected by the death of their father. Steven Wilson dedicated his 2011 album Grace for Drowning ‘to my father, Michael George Wilson’ and a few years later admitted to Jerry Ewing of Prog that when writing his next album The Raven that Refused to Sing (and Other Stories) (2013), ‘my father had just passed away when I wrote The Raven, so it stands to reason that I was in a much darker place then.’ And Roger Waters of Pink Floyd wrote a bitter account of the death of his father Eric Fletcher Waters in battle during the Second World War in the song When the Tigers Broke Free (released as a single in 1982; added to The Final Cut album by Pink Floyd in 2004).

Bruun’s father was also a musician and songwriter, and although he didn’t really talk to his daughter about his own music, the two played together and collaborated on her first solo album in 2006. She told New Noise that her father was very well-known in Denmark, ‘it just gives you comfort that everyone in my country knows him.’ To honour his name, she continues making her own music and also protects the copyright of her father’s songs. The title of the song My Blood is Gold refers to his music living on through her,

‘…after he died, I had this feeling his music lives on in me, in my blood’

The track begins with doom-laden piano and evocative strings from cellists Gyða Valtýsdóttir and Brent Arnold. Bruun’s voice enters, sombre, low in her range and funereal, as she describes the pain her father suffered from the chains of an uncaring world in which ‘all is fair in love and war.’ Her father has now been released from that pain, but she can still feel it. Eerie strings surround Bruun’s sepulchral voice, drenched in echo, as she falls into the ‘fire pit’ of the world of suffering and her voice sinks low into the pit. It rises again with passion as she describes her father’s final hour, ‘it’s hard to breathe’, as the track briefly takes on an epic quality in the chorus before it falls away again on the haunting words ‘my blood is gold.’ The track reaches a brief hiatus in which the voice is surrounded by a spectral choir and the strings descend in a short glissando as the ground falls away beneath us. The song begins again, languorously and almost unwillingly, as Bruun describes the terrible scene of despair that surrounds her, of ‘bodies scattered around.’ When the chorus returns it feels almost uplifting, with a choir of female voices joining in, but the energy drops again as the words ‘my blood is gold’ are repeated and the glacial piano motif of the start of the track returns. The track ends with a spine-tingling moment as the strings drift out of focus, eerie and unsettling, before reaching a tentative resolution. This deeply moving track perfectly describes Bruun’s despair at her father’s death and her resolve for his memory to live on through her music.

Myrkur’s European Tour starts in Berlin in April 2024, with UK dates in Manchester (9 April) and London (10 April). Spine is out now.

Sources

Douglas Menagh, New Noise Magazine – Interview – Amalie Bruun of Myrkur Talks ‘Spine’ (16/10/23)

Discogs, Michael Bruun Discography

Jerry Ewing, Prog Magazine The story of Steven Wilson’s Hand. Cannot. Erase. (February 2015) 

Personal note: for the effect that my own Father had on my musical journey, see my tribute to him here.