Vilde&Inga's ECM debut is not the sort of album you should put on if you're battling a headache. There's an extended section in track two, ‘Sårand’, where classically trained Norway Academy of Music alumnae Vilde Sandve Alnæs and Inga Margrete Aas appear to be scratching at their instruments – violin and double bass, respectively – to make them sound as much like badly hungover ducks quacking at one another as possible. Elsewhere the pair's astringent sound is more akin to the ascetic stillness of baroque religious music. ‘Our band name is written without spaces,’ the duo say, but paradoxically, the music they make is all about space. ‘Naturally,’ writes Martin Rane Bauck in his liner note, ‘there is a division of the roles of the violin and the double bass, the former often floating over the steady grounds of the latter’ – not that Aas is content with offering up a conventional bass sound, making her instrument putter and chug like a lawnmower heard in the distance on ‘Røtter’, for instance.