Moonlight in Visby is…

Brian Macdonald’s debut album as Victor Mucho, written and recorded during his time living abroad in Sweden. Macdonald, his wife, and his dog bunkered down on the remote island of Gotland, found in the Baltic Sea. Marooned in the tiny, rural town of Visby, their new home sat atop a massive grey limestone rock, the last remnants of what was once a coral reef. They settled within the five-mile town, threaded with brick-lined streets and bordered by a medieval defensive wall from eight centuries ago. His daily walks to the grocery store would be enveloped by Viking ruins. They held a year of seclusion and silence with the ancient, bordered by the cold and stormy Baltic tides. With his wife spending her days in school, Victor Mucho learned to surf, chartering himself against the crashing sea and discovering his own frailty.

Leaving his home in Tennessee proved difficult. The tides pushed him into eerie loneliness on an island that spoke a different language. Then came the winter. The crashing waves that soundtracked his days crested, reaching near-freezing temperatures. Every so often, the winds faded and the waters stilled, and the island would sit stoically in the dark, crisp air. This 14 song album is shaped by that space. That feeling of vastness and isolation in a closed-in world. Every day was a study and acceptance of weakness, found in the waves and in one’s heart. Each day asked him whether he should wait for home or wake and build a new one. Victor Mucho reckoned with love and identity, forged by the frigid Baltic Sea and quenched by fires on the beach.

The songs came to life in a dark bedroom next to the sea, at times lit by the moon, other times by only a candle. Except “made a fire,” birthed on a chilly fall evening around a campfire at the northern tip of the sheep island Fårö, adjacent to Gotland. Fårö housed many moments of the songwriting process. Days and nights camping and traversing were accompanied by his guitar. You will hear this when listening to “Moonlight in Visby.” Fårö was also the home of legendary filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. It was the place where he gained inspiration from the land and shot many of his films. Bergman’s bleak outlook of the world seems founded by the rigid lithic landscape of the island. Victor Mucho’s entire life had centered on optimism leading up to his time in Visby. The collision of the cold waves and the solemn solitude of Bergman’s world is married to that clashing personal worldview of hope throughout Moonlight in Visby and Victor Mucho’s search for identity. And those worldviews collide at the lighthouse on Fårö; the point where a calm, quiet sandy beach meets the rocky strand, and the rigid harsh landscape of Fårö.