Before the world came into existence there was only ginnungagap, the yawning void where fire and ice eventually combined to create life. The Norse world is full of gods, magic and battle, all ending in the prophesied apocalypse, Ragnarök. Völuspá follows this narrative by deriving musical content directly from the language of the Old Norse poem itself.

First envisioned as a live, single take recording in a studio environment, Völuspá quickly became a bedroom project performed almost entirely by Hugh. A keen fan of heavy guitar based music, he sought to capture the idiomatic qualities of these genres while blending them with generative compositional techniques from the western art music world. The result is a 19 minute doom epic filled with dissonant riffs, heavy repetition and a continuing sense of momentum carried by the four part alliterative verse inspired structure.

Each riff is systematically generated via a phoneme to pitch equivalence chart, allowing words to create pitch sets. From these pitch sets riffs, modal progressions and atonal ambient soundscapes are created. The system is used to varying degrees of strictness, always following the compositional principle that aesthetics outweigh adherence to the system. In Old Norse poetry, the lines are alliterative, each containing four stressed syllables. The first and second of these can alliterate to the third, whereas the fourth never does. The piece therefore follows an ABCD structure, with the C section containing the main musical and conceptual content.

Section A is derived from the line ‘gap var ginnunga, en gras hvergi’, meaning ‘a yawning gap, and grass nowhere’ which describes the world before the creation of earth. The unsettling ambient intro establishes the tone of the piece before suddenly dropping into an unstable chord progression. Section B features swirling drones of guitar feedback behind dissonant guitar soloing that progresses through generated pitch sets.

Section C is generated purely from the single word ginnunga. Vowel types also provided generated articulations for the main riff, distinguishing between open, closed and middle vowels to indicate slides, octaves and duration. Sections A and B alliterate to C by way of the word ginnunga, as well as sharing pitch sets and an overall momentum. Section D is purposefully different, generated from the line ‘sól tér sortna, sígr fold í mar’, or ‘sun turns black, land sinks into sea’ from the poetic recounting of Ragnarök. The ending crossfade into the ambient drones signals the ending of the world, while also recalling the beginning textures of the piece.

Völuspá is a culmination of Hugh's knowledge of heavy guitar music and his compositional studies. The result is an idiomatic doom metal piece with complex conceptual and technical foundations that merge language, poetry and music into a cohesive instrumental work.