The Bell Tower

From early on in her artistic journey, composer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Rebekka Karijord has been fascinated by the human voice. Known for her sweeping film scores as well as her work with Jessica Dessner and The National’s Bryce and Aaron Dessner in Complete Mountain Almanac, she brings a unique perspective to every one of her projects. Even as an 18-year-old music student in her native Norway, she marched to the beat of her own drum: one of her first experimental productions was composed using only her voice. “I went into the studio and made a piece about an ephemeral girl who only lived for 10 minutes. She came out of an egg, which was a black plastic bag. There were no words, but it was an all vocal piece, which is basically what I’m doing again now. I find it so interesting how creativity is cyclical like that.”

The return of the 10-Minute Girl is The Bell Tower, her seventh solo album and one of her most ambitious records to date. It’s an ode to our planet in peril, a missive from a mother to her children, and a meditation on humanity and our place within the natural world. It’s also an experiment—something that evolved from a tiny idea into an all-encompassing work touching on 19th-century poetry, environmental activism, and the cross-section of digital and organic instrumentation. Yet Rebekka has managed to stack all of these ideas and moods into something balanced, harmonious, and at times even calming. Made of voice alone, the album’s many complex layers are solidly built by her expertise as a producer.

“Six years ago, I got in touch with the linguistic department at Stockholm University, who do voice research with contact microphones for people with hearing and vocal disabilities,” Rebekka explains. “They actually made a few of the microphones for me, which are technically really amazing. I ended up recording 25 female, non-binary, and male singers from all over the world, and built a sample instrument out of the individual voices, as well as my own.” This instrument is the foundation of The Bell Tower, and the result is breathtaking—by manipulating the pitch, delay, and other characteristics of the samples, Rebekka unlocks an entire universe of sound, all originating from the human voice. “I didn’t necessarily pick them for being the most perfect singers,” she says, “but rather for having a special voice.”

Once the instrument was built, Rebekka realized that she had more than an experiment in sound—she had a full-fledged record on her hands. “I wrote some pieces, but I felt that while the samples on their own were strong, something was missing. I contacted Roomful of Teeth, the American voice ensemble which features Caroline Shaw as a member, and they were super excited about the material.” Still, the songs lacked a focal point—until Rebekka came across an episode of the podcast On Being with an interview with the Buddhist poet, translator, and philosopher Joanna Macy, and something clicked.

“I heard a sequence where she was talking about ‘grief over a changing world,’ and that really became the record’s headline,” explains Rebekka. “With her permission, I started trying to set music to poems by Rainer Maria Rilke that she had translated. He described a longing for the natural world, for a deep belonging—but he also describes the Anthropocene and disintegration from nature, way ahead of his time. There is so much longing and movement in his words, so much intuition and sensitivity. That’s a great starting point for music.” The album’s title comes from Rilke’s poem “Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower”, referencing the power of art to transform fear into something beautiful and valuable.

On the emotional and reverent opening track, “Lacrimosa”, Rebekka samples the very interview that sparked the album’s theme. “It seems clear that we who are alive now are […] witnessing something for our planet that has not happened at any time before […] There’s a need some of us feel, I know I do, to what looks like it must disappear, to say, ‘Thanks, you’re beautiful.’” The clear, pure tones of the voice instrument add to the solemnity of Macy’s words, tapping into something ancient and spiritual—a healing balm for the anxiety of confronting our changing planet.

Rebekka then had to decide whether to add her own voice to the mix. “I had always thought of this as a choir record, but I wasn’t intending to have my own voice in it,” she says. “When I recorded Roomful of Teeth at the Grieg Hall in Bergen, the choir parts were amazing, they’re so good at all the extended techniques. After sitting with the recordings, I realized that the album needed a personal perspective, to be able to truly connect with the themes I was approaching.” Her voice anchors the ethereal samples and choir recordings, making the album a hybrid of her instrumental world and her pop/singer-songwriter world. “A lot of the sample instrument parts I transcribed into score that Roomful of Teeth would mimic. Oscillating between the synthetic and organic was the framing all along.”

The Bell Tower is also the first of her solo records Rebekka has produced entirely on her own. “When I do film scores, I produce everything myself,” she says, “but for some reason, when it’s been my own records, I’ve felt like I needed a kind of distance. With this record, I was protective of the material. It could easily have gone in the wrong direction if someone had said, ‘Oh, you should just add some instruments,’ or ‘This could be more dance.’” The album was mixed by David Chalmin in Biarritz, France, and mastered by Taylor Dupree in New York, which was “when things really fell into place,” according to Rebekka. “It’s a little bit tricky, because since it’s all voice, a lot of it is in the same frequency. But I wanted to be a little hardcore about it, and work within the limitations. It was really fun, and I learned a lot.”

Rebekka’s vision is perhaps most evident on “Sanctuary”, the lead single and one of the album’s most arresting moments. Addressed to her two young daughters, it imagines a path forward in the face of climate change, and what our current efforts mean to future generations. At its core, it is an expression of a mother’s love in the face of the unimaginable—the most personal song on the album.

“‘Sanctuary’ is one of those songs that wrote itself,” she says. “It’s a song for my daughters–they’re seven and 10–and they grew up in nature, nature is their sanctuary. That’s their safe place. They both know what climate change is, but how do you as a grown up tell a child how drastic it is? It’s so massive to comprehend, and it’s impossible as a parent to look your kid in the eyes and say, ‘This is not going to be like this forever,’ you know?” Musically, the song reflects this aching sorrow, its placid tones intermingling with evocative lyrics. “My Daughter, have the Springs gone silent?/Will you ever dare to have a child?” Rebekka sings softly. “Or has the ocean reached your doorstep? And the sun turned hostile?” While stark, the song remains reflective, digging deep for a sense of hope. “Every story we have, every song we have, everything is based upon this planet.”

“Serenade”, another highlight, begins with the euphonious cooing of the vocal instrument until Rebekka’s soprano comes in, supported by lush harmonies. Midway through, her voice distorts into a deep, low wail, bringing the song to an emotional peak. “‘Serenade’ is a love song to nature. It’s like laying down on a bed of moss and just being submerged in that feeling and forgetting yourself,” she says. “One of the first intentions I wrote in my notebook about this record was, I want to make something that sounds like it’s religious, but with nature as the church. It’s like entering some sort of a wooded sacred space—like a return to paganism but with a modern sensibility.”

“Fugue”, which blends elements of electronica, experimental music, classical, and ambient, is where the sample instrument is at its most bare, with several voices interlocking in uplifting arpeggios. “This track is the most digital piece, or the most synthetic, electronically processed piece. I think every voice on that piece is actually sampled, including Martha Cluver, who is this amazing soprano in Roomful of Teeth.” Its momentum mimics the seemingly unstoppable forward motion of the modern era, but not only that. “It can also be about the circular parts of nature,” clarifies Rebekka, “but it’s always something that is an ongoing, forward-moving thing. It’s more of a form than a song in that regard.”

Bringing together Joanna Macy’s Buddhist environmentalism, Rilke’s spiritual reverence, the full range of the human voice, and a mastery of music production, The Bell Tower is a body of work to be listened to with intent—a fully realized experience of what it feels like to live through the present. “Historically, we’ve been using nature in theater, in film, in music, as something that is a set design for our lives, where we are the protagonists,” Rebekka says. “An idea that has been resonating with me lately, what we need to deeply understand, is that we are all made of the same stardust. When we destroy nature, we are destroying ourselves. That’s what writing this album has been—an attempt to go deeper into that notion.”