Arc by Jacob Kirkegaard

Jacob Kirkegaard's soundtrack for Carl Dreyer's silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).

In this edit, running to just under 36 minutes, Kirkegaard’s refined mastery of tone unfolds in two arc-shaped tracks dedicated to the LP format.

In his score, Kirkegaard fragments and stretches music from Joan's time, aiming to expose the mystically charged atmosphere that could simultaneously declare Joan of Arc a visionary and a heretic. The outcome is an immersive score of prolonged choral-like harmonies that evolve slowly, constantly shifting between darkness and light. Arc lives in moments of transition, embracing the subtle ambiguities that were so difficult for the English clerics to understand and yet so pliable in Joan's flexible mind. Perhaps it is what shade sounds like, or perhaps it is a meditative resonance on the brilliance and terror of thought. Arc is an unfolding of nebulous sound that emerges to the surface when time is suspended.


Jacob Kirkegaard - Arc - Holotype Editions LP - Review by Jim Haynes, The Wire, January 2016
Kirkegaard follows his exceptional 2014 soundtrack to 40 Days of Silence with this commissioned score for the 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc by Carl Theodor Dreyer. His composition is awash with the serenity found in the communion with the divine, even as the pyre has been lit from below. The luxuriant minimalism of his suspended harmonic tones and slow rotational melodies slips and glides across emotionally charged surfaces of violence, prayer, holiness and conviction of thought. At the end of the first side a human voice breaks through the prolonged reverberation and resonant vibration with a simple plainsong





JACOB KIRKEGAARD - Arc (LP/CD) Holotype Editions. Review by Hubert Heathertoes at Felthat

Jacob Kirkegaard has been an active composer for a good bit of time and his expression matured in time as he treads a very narrow path of highly and elusively conceptual sound art, modern composition, philosophical references and as in this piece - historical ones - namely Joan D'Arc and her times. Stretched over roughly 36 minutes material from "Arc" was actually a commission input for 1928 Carl Th. Dreyer film about passion of Joan D'Arc. A soundtrack that can quite legibly and easily exist outside the context of the picture is a high class in itself aligned with the vinyl format which is not something too shabby to see how the whole unit is presented. Embellished and unobtrusive.
The harmonies of the material slowly tide up and pile up subtly to be felt deeper afterwards. It's quite something to achieve and definitely there is more to that when you think of the whole historical entourage of the mask that bears so many existentialism on philosophical level.
There is some sort of untouched fright that opens slowly. An echo of something lost, some old dreams of pain and ideas that feel humanly impossible now..yet to be understood. Excellent work!




JACOB KIRKEGAARD - Arc (LP/CD) Holotype Editions. Review by dr. wu, Freistil, January 2016

Auf dem vorliegenden Release präsentiert der dänische Klangkünstler und Komponist seine Interpretation eines Soundtracks zu Carl Theodor Dreyers legendärem Film Die Passion der Jungrau von Orleans, ursprünglich eine seiner Arbeiten für das Filmfestival Inmute ’14, dessen künstlerischer Schwerpunkt sich mit der Erforschung neuer Methoden und Zugänge im Sinne der Synergie von Klang und bewegtem Bild befasst. Zwei getragene Stücke mit den klingenden Namen Arc 1 und Arc 2 und knapp unter 36 Minuten Spielzeit finden sich auf dieser, als LP konzipierten Veröffentlichung. Die bogenhafte Dramaturgie der Stücke, die sich anmutig jeweils über eine eigene Plattenseite spannen, beschreibt adäquat den Zustand der Protagonistin zwischen Vision, Häresie und Wahnsinn. Sich dehnende, an Choräle angelehnte Drones und gläserne, orgelhaft anmutende Schwebungskaskaden versinnbildlichen die innere Zerrissenheit einer Figur im gezogenen Transitionsmoment, ihr meditatives Räsonnieren zwischen Brillanz und Horror der eigenen Gedanken. Sehr stimmungsvoll, sehr stark!

Sound artist and composer, born in DK 1975. Kirkegaard's sound works have been released on labels such as Important Records (USA), Touch (UK), mAtter (JAP) and Posh Isolation (DK). He is a founding member of the sound art collective freq_out as well as the not-for-profit arts organisation TOPOS. In 2016 Kirkegaard was the sound-artist-in-residency at St. John's College, University of Oxford, U.K.

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