• Courtesy
• Fimnur, Snowbound

(Self-released, digital)

It was a vibrantly green, beautiful summer day when I moved back to Vermont as an adult, with flowers in bloom and long, sunlit days ahead. My father, a Massachusetts native, had sent me north with a list of tactics for surviving the oncoming brutal Vermont winter: Take up skiing, get a vitamin D light, don't drink clear liquor (don't ask me; the Irish are weird about booze), watch comedies in January. It was extensive, and I've adhered to some of it, to be fair.

It took me a few years to figure out my real go-to move for enduring winter: Embrace it. Dive into the bleakness, the short days, the long nights and the cold. Once I stopped trying to cheer up and just let the darkness surround me, I found peace with it.

Perhaps that's what the debut album from Vermont artist Fimnur is all about. Snowbound is a nine-track record of dark, ambient music and hushed synths that create a world of frozen beauty — think tree branches encased in ice and swirling eddies of snow in the wind. A concept record of sorts, it seems to follow a winter traveler though the snowy mountains near their home.

"Under Starry Skies" opens the record with tentative blips and a halting synth pad, like the tendrils of winter creeping in to smother the last of the green. The song seems to be building toward something, but it's a winter mirage, giving the impression of momentum when all is static.

Things take a sinister turn on "The Mountain Pass," as an interminably drawn-out minor key tone drones ominously in the background and Fimnur sprinkles notes like flakes falling from the sky. The tune flows seamlessly into "Snowfall," a ponderous, almost sleepy affair.

Indeed, Snowbound could double as an ambient channel on Spotify and provide a good soundtrack for sleep, were one so inclined. But the record isn't simply a collection of relaxing sounds, it's an artistic interpretation of Vermont's famously hostile hibernal season. As "Frozen Dreams" chills us like a door opened in winter, it becomes clear what Fimnur is attempting to do sonically.

A purposefully mysterious figure, Fimnur usually makes very different music under another moniker, but he has asked us to keep his musical day job under wraps. Before anyone gets too conspiracy-minded, Fimnur is not a famous Vermont musician making an under-the-radar ambient record, as Phish's Page McConnell did in 2021 with his all-synth Maybe We're the Visitors.

Whoever else he may be, Fimnur is a musician who clearly understands winter in Vermont. Take "Warm Hearth," for example, a brief interlude that brings the listener in from the cold. The tone of the synths grows warmer, more comforting, as if drawing us toward a glowing fire.

The record's trajectory isn't necessarily toward spring and renewal, however. After the penultimate track, "Avalanche," the album concludes with "Into Open Arms," an almost funereal dirge, suggesting that the winter traveler at the center of Snowbound might not make it out of the darkest season. Like my father told me, a real winter is not for the faint of heart.

Snowbound is streaming at fimnur.bandcamp.com.