There’s a moment on Liquid Stone where everything stops – just a single piano note stumbling quietly in the background, searching for its place. Trude Eidtang’s voice arrives like a hand reaching through the darkness, not to rescue but to join, to put an arm around your shoulder, which says, “I see you. I feel you. I know what it feels like to be adrift.” In this singular moment, we arrive at the heart of what Whispers of Granite are offering us: music which doesn’t just acknowledge our peculiarly modern feelings of disconnection but sits with us, breathes with us, and in the process, finds unexpected beauty in the spaces between us.
We live in an ‘always on’, breathlessly pulsating, hyper-connected world. Life veritably pulses and throbs all around us. And yet. Scratch deeper. Dive beneath all the hustle and bustle and all the noise. Isolated in our rooms, illuminated by the glowing light of a screen, all we ‘really’ seem to have achieved is perfect the art of being alone together.
Liquid Stone is the debut collaboration between Norwegian vocalist Trude Eidtang (White Willow, When Mary) and German keyboardist Andreas Hack (Frequency Drift, Haven of Echoes). Listening to the tender vulnerability which infuses their music, the partnership feels like a meeting of kindred spirits. Across eight profoundly penetrating tracks, they have crafted something both expansive and intimate – music which breathes with the same rhythms and textures as our inner lives.
The album opens with Spirals (Track 1), where Eidtang’s voice cuts through howling wind with startling clarity, commanding yet vulnerable: “Where is the storm?” It’s a ghostly question haunting the entire journey – not just the weather outside, but the storms we carry within us, the ones we can’t quite name or locate until they’re already here. Hack’s minimalist keys hover and swirl like mist over cold water, slightly distorted, creating an atmosphere where anticipation and expectation become almost tangible.
When Eidtang’s voice returns, like a siren’s call asking “Do you think we’ve lost our way?” – the phrase itself begins to dissolve into thin air, memory fading like footprints in sand. The drums and keys crescendo toward the inevitable moment: “Here comes the storm.” But when it arrives, we do not feel the power of a destructive force. Rather, it’s a kind of simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar feeling of lostness, discordant keys echoing alone, doing their own thing without purpose or direction. The honesty it carries is disturbing, and the disorientation it conveys is deeply moving.
This sets the emotional integrity of an album which refuses to offer easy answers or false comfort. Instead, Liquid Stone maps the spaces between connection and isolation with unnerving precision. In Endlessly (Track 3), Eidtang explores the rare yet disconcerting gift of what it feels like to be truly seen by another person. The track opens in an inky deep soundstage, reverberating electronic keys creating rippling effects while her voice, quizzical, questioning, reflective, searches for meaning in the darkness.
Then something shifts. The vocal becomes more assertive as the keyboard takes on hints of menace, distortion increasing like doubt creeping in. But just when the darkness threatens to overwhelm, a guitar suddenly bursts through – life-affirming, confident, soaring. It spreads its wings and flies, transforming the entire sonic landscape. The elegance of the partnership is scintillating; this is musical empathy, instrumental and human voices supplementing and lifting another.
These moments of sonic relief and rescue become a defining characteristic of the album. In Ocean Maker (Track 5), we encounter the same pattern again, this time with even greater complexity. The vocal skips and dances through musical textures, playful yet purposeful, searching for layered contrasts that reveal delicacy without fragility. The music bends, explores, discovering new paths when the obvious ones seem blocked.
When Marek Arnold’s saxophone breaks through the murk like a shaft of sunlight, it injects direction, confidence, even comfort. The sax carries us away from uncertainty toward something approaching hope, culminating in a brief silence and a single piano note quietly fading into the background. This time, Eidtang’s voice comes to the rescue, uplifted by Arnold’s confident lead, shining light on where the journey is taking us. The sounds of waves on a beach carry us to the track’s close, and suddenly that earlier question – “Why did you let the currents take her?” – feels less like an accusation and more like acceptance of forces beyond our control.
This nuanced interplay between surrender and agency runs throughout Liquid Stone, reflected not just in the lyrics but in how Hack structures these musical conversations. His atmospheric keyboards don’t simply provide a backdrop; they participate, sometimes agitated and uncertain, whilst at other times offering gentle cascades of support. The exquisite production allows each element space to breathe while maintaining the album’s emotional arc. The guest contributions – Wolfgang Ostermann’s drums, Michael Fischer’s bass work, Paul Sadler’s guitar solos – integrate seamlessly into the duo’s vision. This is music where collaboration is viewed as a conversation, not a competition.
The emotional sophistication and finesse of the album are startling. Hiding in Plain Sight (Track 2) confronts our modern paradox directly – people who “seem so cold, yet breathing fire,” living artificial lives while running along “rails of steel still hot with anger.” The urban sense of alienation persists in Fleet City (Track 4), with its vacant buildings and surfaces that no one dares pierce, while Age of Seven (Track 7) ventures into more mystical territory, explicitly invoking the album’s central metaphor as voices “turn into liquid stone.” By the time we reach Silver Green (Track 8), the uncompromising promise “this world will overcome us all” is followed by a gentle insistence that we should “be the best you can be.”
I believe there is something profoundly courageous about Liquid Stone – not in a grand or heroic sense, but in its willingness to embrace uncertainty, to find beauty in confusion, to acknowledge that sometimes the most honest thing we can do is admit we don’t know where the storm is coming from. Eidtang’s vocals carry this courage in every phrase, never hiding behind vocal pyrotechnics but instead using her remarkable range – from delicate whispers to soaring heights – to map the full spectrum of human feeling and human being.
This is what the best progressive music has always done: used complexity not as an end in itself, but as a means of expressing what simpler forms cannot capture. The album pulses with the warmth of life itself, even in its moments of deepest uncertainty. The ‘liquid stone’ metaphor becomes our lived reality – moments when our barricades dissolve into something more fluid, more capable of change. Something genuinely transformative emerges across these eight tracks – music which isn’t just a soundtrack of our disconnection, but offers us the possibility of reconnection, one vulnerable note at a time.
TRACK LISTING
01. Spirals (7:15)
02. Hiding In Plain Sight (5:04)
03. Endlessly (4:56)
04. Fleet City (4:07)
05. Ocean Maker (8:10)
06. One More Reason (4:51)
07. Age Of Seven (5:46)
08. Silver Green (6:43)
Total Time – 46:52
MUSICIANS
Trude Eidtang – Vocals & Vocal Arrangements
Andreas Hack – All Instruments [except]
~ With:
Marek Arnold – Saxophone (5)
Michael Fischer – Bass (6)
Wolfgang Ostermann – Drums
Paul Sadler – Guitar Solo (3 & 8)
ADDITIONAL INFO
Record Label: Apollon Records
Country of Origin: Norway/Germany
Date of Release: 4th July 2025
LINKS
Whispers Of Granite – Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | YouTube | Instagram
