Ivar Orvedal: Postreptilia

Ivar Orvedal is a multifaceted artist and traditional-style mountain farmer living in the remote area of Ytre Sogn in Western Norway.

His work is located in the fields of written and spoken poetry as well as musical composition. For the album Postreptilia Orvedal’s sonorous voice is confronted with the spontaneous carillon playing by Laura Marie Rueslåtten (the carillonist at the Oslo City Hall) and the soundscape created by producer and multi-instrumentalist Geir Sundstøl.

With this release Orvedal’s sonic work is elegantly paired with an artist book to form an integrated experience of music, spoken word and their typographic representation.

The album cover and the accompanying artist book were designed by Modest [Rune Døli] and Ellmer Stefan in close collaboration with Ivar Orvedal. Using The Pyte Foundry’s Triptych Regular and Italick as well as Omnigraf (currently not available for licensing) in its various degrees of automated abstraction visually binds the vinyl sleeve and the artist book together.

Weaving the Norwegian original with the English translation makes for an intense parallel reading of these often wondrously archaic poems. In strong contrast to the poem’s topics the colour palette is reduced to black and signal orange, also shining from the fore-edge of the saddle-stitched artist book.