The first half-minute is barely music at all: one bell struck and left to ring until it thins, then another, each alone in the room. Thirty seconds of that, and the space it clears is the point — an opening held open rather than filled. A rattle slides in low under the bells, a drone steadies beneath it, and just before the minute mark the frame drum takes its first slow step. Within a few strides the step is no longer something you hear. The body picks it up and does not put it down for more than eight minutes.

The first voice, around 2:00, is a high, unhurried chant riding above the pounding, level where the drums are heavy. The words are Old High German, the idisi — women seated, some binding fetters, some hampering an army, some undoing what was tied — and the charm ends on a plain command: spring clear of the bonds. Hold onto that command. It comes due at the end.

At 3:37 the litany proper begins, and its form is strict. Þann gel ek þér — that I chant to you as the first — then a refrain that washes, in the same words every time, the enemies' malice, the theft and rage of powerful men, away from the one speaking. Second. Third. Fourth. Each cycle barely twenty seconds, and the drum never varies its step; only the number advances. That is the whole rite in miniature: name the danger, count it, wash it, again. Around the middle of the nine a deep spoken voice enters and takes the verses, and by then the refrain has stopped being information — repeated liturgy always does — it has become the act itself. Ninth. Done.

At 6:55 the opening charm returns, the seated women and their binding and loosing, over a drum that still holds the body to its stride. The circle has closed, but the rite is not finished, because it has not yet let the body go.

The last minute is where the promise is kept. Just past nine, the pattern that ran unbroken since the first minute begins to give way — a break, then another — and around 9:23 the hold loosens; the drum eases and thins until a soft high voice is nearly all that carries, over fading percussion and the same kind of bells that opened the piece, into quiet. Eight minutes of binding, and then insprinc haptbandun — spring out of the fetters — not described but performed: the track loosens exactly what it tied. What remains is the condition the words kept promising.