A ten-year-old cellist playing weekend restaurant gigs beside her opera-singer mother in Iceland became, in 2020, the first Icelander to win an Academy Award and the first solo woman to win Best Original Score since the category's branches were merged in 2000. This episode traces Hildur Guðnadóttir from a Reykjavík childhood saturated with professional musicians, through the Reykjavík Music Academy, the Iceland Academy of the Arts and the Berlin University of the Arts, to the 2006 debut album Mount A, recorded under the alias Lost in Hildurness with a strict rule of zero collaborators so she could strip away the echoes of her training and hear her own voice.

The story then follows her into the underground with Pan Sonic, Throbbing Gristle, múm, Animal Collective and the drone metal band Sunn O))), where she mastered the halldorophone, a cel ...