Cafe Oto, London, UK
Photo: Verði Ljós

Dave Welder, a prolific Brighton project led by the film maker Ben Wheatley and music producer Simon Byrt, have amassed over a dozen eclectic lo-fi releases on Bandcamp since August 2024. Seated behind synths, laptops and MIDI controllers, the duo push out warp engine basslines laced with a lamentful sci-fi soliloquy that borrows the template of The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld. In a further nod to their ambient house forebears, the projection behind the group shows mirrored images of fluffy clouds. Looped piano sequences and sampled soul vocals later lift us out of the deep space odyssey, segueing nicely into warmly discordant industrial spaces.

This sets the scene for the richly gothic timbres of the headliner. Iceland’s Hekla Magnúsdóttir is a theremin player who embraces the instrument’s associations with the supernatural, leaning into horror movie tropes evoked by its sinuous tones, while conversely steering the sounds to somewhere new. Her merch, for example, includes a pin badge showing disembodied hands hovering in the dark – spectral warnings of the devastation to come.

She begins with an improvised piece, its rattling subs and metallic sirens quickly engulfing the room. Bathed in vampiric light, Hekla teases clandestine melodies out of the air that murmur and disappear as the viscous low end spreads across the venue like swamp fog. Hekla’s right hand controls the pitch – poised as if pulling invisible threads – while her left hand droops inside a curved antenna responsible for the amplitude. Her equipment consists of little more than a Moog Claravox and a modest collection of pedals that loop and augment the sounds created by the instrument, yet this minimal set-up is more than enough to create vast sonic environments.

Hekla comes from a classical background, initially learning cello, and “bought the theremin on a whim”. She joined Bárujárn in the late 2000s, adding atmospheric textures to the band’s brooding surf rock. After going solo, Hekla began exploring the theremin’s unnerving potential, feeling drawn to darker themes prevalent in doom metal and drone. “It can be quite a dramatic instrument,” she tells me, “with the high notes, bass and vibrato. It’s often compared to a human voice – you get this fragility. Even though it’s a simple wave, the pedals allow you to pitch-shift and distort the signal to get these different colours. It opens a whole new dimension of sound.”

This dimension is fully explored in the remainder of the set, which is dominated by compositions from her last two albums Xiuxiuejar and Turnar. The melancholy topline on “Silfurofinn” recalls the human voice, wordlessly beckoning the listener into the depths, while Hekla’s own vocals on “The Whole” makes this invitation explicit: “Come to the hole… let it cover you up and blind your senses”.

Hekla later explains that it’s necessary to have an awareness of your whole body when playing the theremin because minor movements affect the pitch: “You’re playing in the air – drawing the music.” Turnar was partially recorded in a French castle and tracks like “Var” and “Gráminn” replicate the physicality of the tower’s medieval structure, evoking the candlelit uncertainties of the Old World. These emotions are then brought forward and combined with the theremin’s neoteric language, creating music that is at once ancient, futuristic and imbued with phantasmagorical apprehension.

Ilia Rogatchevski
Originally published by The Wire, April 2025