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“If I Had A Heart” - Fever Ray, “Fever Ray” (Mute Records, 2009)
This almost Minimalist piece is dark but luxuriantly, warmly so. It immediately reminded me of the first section of Air’s “Radian”, which has a similar ominous and repetitive background figure. I think the pitches it modulates across (in both cases) are the natural spectral overtones. (Try making a single-pitch vowel sound while making your lips wider and narrower to see what I mean.) I think that pitch spectrum is part of what I mean by its “warmth”—while in some ways it’s very synthetic (the autotuned and deepened version of the singer’s voice, for example), it still has an undeniably “human” sound to me.
