I've been returning lately to …And They Have Escaped the Weight of Darkness by Ólafur Arnalds. It's an album I write to—not as background, but as a kind of formal pressure. The compositions move patiently, through repetition and small tonal shifts rather than dramatic change, and I'm drawn to work that trusts atmosphere over event, accumulation over arrival.
The piano writing is deceptively simple. In "Kjurrt," three notes carry the entire piece, but by the end they've shifted meaning completely. The notes stay the same—it's the strings around them that shift. The same phrase in a different climate. As a pianist, that interests me more than virtuosity: how context alters what a held note can mean.
Across the album, the string quartet carries much of the emotional weight while the piano keeps its own weather—spare, rhythmically steady, almost procedural. When percussion enters, particularly on "Tunglið" and "Gleypa okkur," it arrives as disturbance rather than anchor. The restraint elsewhere makes those moments land harder.
I put it on when I'm drafting and the room needs to be quieter than silence—when I need something with enough structure to settle my attention but enough space to let language move through it. The album doesn't fill a room. It changes the room's pressure.
The title promises light after darkness, but the music is more patient than that. It stays in the unstable space between states rather than resolving toward one. Most of the actual living happens there, in the shift itself.
— Kath Healing (they/them) is a queer, trans, disabled poet living on the traditional territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking peoples in Victoria, BC. Winner of the 2025 Victoria Writers’ Society Poetry Contest, their work appears or is forthcoming in Contemporary Verse 2, Grain, The Malahat Review, PRISM international, and Pulp Literature.
You can read Kath Healing's poem "Fatigue Climate Report" in Issue 308 (Summer 2026) Disability: The Revolution. Order the issue now:
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