ABRAID

Abraid

Isa Holmgren (SE, voice) and Elise Boeur (CA, violin + hardingfele)

Abraid is a new duo project for violin and voice that synthesizes Boeur & Holmgren’s mutual interest in the expressive elements of traditional Norwegian folk music, and their intimate and perceptive individual improvising styles. With this project, they are making room for their voices as composers; solidifying forms, grasping the ephemeral and binding it to the earth as an act of future-seeking. When texts are introduced, they act as a reason for exploring sound.

Following a chance meeting at a house party in Göteborg, Boeur and Holmgren began improvising together. Their early collaborations involved touring as members of performance poetry quartet robertalanfuturehearts, and partnering on a recording for Elise’s quintet Aerialists, which received a Canadian Folk Music Award for Pushing The Boundaries.

Maintaining a correspondence through the pandemic led to an interest in creating their own music on their own terms. With support from the Canada Council for the Arts, they brought that correspondence to the tangible realm in 2024, meeting in Oslo to extend their voices towards one another, and beginning the generative process of their music as a duo. In early 2025 they took space to develop this new work, with a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts under the mentorship of the Kronos Quartet, Benedicte Maurseth, and Kristine Tjøgersen, and a composition residency at The Music Gallery in Toronto.

Elegant and abrasive, their music toys with the necessity of sparseness imposed by working with two melody instruments, and then simply ignores those confines in order to say what it wants to say.