Nexsound – experimental, ambient, noise, improv record label

Review

Earlabs

Saralunden.Björkås.Mjös – Dubious

Saralunden.Björkås.Mjös-Dubious
The blending of aural solicitations on Dubious are tantamount to a libidinal striptease. Kyrre Bjorkas, Sara Lunden, Andreas Mjos, and Ida Lunden play a seductive game, using an array of amorous stratagems while they chart a gradual engagement with song constructs, spanning a number of different genres. In five songs that last some fifteen minutes, Dubious is a dense quilt of sounds. Tape loops are utilized to recontextualize lazy vocals and gloopy basslines that hang in the background with raga-like intensity. Melodies crystalize for fleeting moments, then dissolve into sections of spiraling abstraction that are abrasive and spirited in equal measure. In between these poles, synthesizer and drum programming emit foreboding backdrops for Bjorkas soprano surges and swells. In the end, there is enough mingling of tender chanson with barbed blues to warrant hope for further forays into such alluring artifice. Max Schaefer

Earlabs

Critikal – Graphorrhea

Sound artist and label manager Andrey Kiritchenko cajoles and browbeats with Kvitnu foreman Dmytro Fedorenko, and musicians Tobias Astrom, and Jeff Surak on this slab of enchanted sonic excrescence.

Graphorrhea, the albums title, can be defined as the scribbling of lengthy lists of meaningless words. Indeed, the group evince no qualms with obscenity, that is with the tearing away of sounds from their setting, in fact, even from any last morsel of sense. The field recordings and instruments exhibited here are volatized by their arbitrariness in manipulation, by their fullness that allows for a litany of quick connections to form and eventually teem like an overgrown forest.

Opener “Tesseract of Distrust” isn’t so much buoyed as it is crestfallen with a ferment of burbling, babbling, and wheezing percussive pops and splashes. With this a momentum is established that serves as the background for successive pieces, one which is either subjected or invested with a small clutch of motifs that are equally punishing and generative in their purification. Here an opaque drumming defines densities, tapping against the background, a harsh, edgy sound, in a manic manner, until like magic it dissolves into a twilight of deformed and gnawed notes. At other times, the brawling meatiness is pummeled with an electronic distortion and the sheer, ecstatic, cranky noise of rock.

Curiously, with only the odd exception, everything on the album shrivels up like a shred of skin after one or two minutes of life, as though its high-wire tension and mad movements can only be sustained for but a very short while. Oddly enough, when approached from a distance, this concision re-establishes a palpable sense of coherence and purpose in the music. When this is removed, and one is lost in its quagmire of unorthodox tunings and thrashing textures as though in a delirium, only a constant threat can be gleaned from its dark surface. As such, the album can be appreciated on both levels.

Max Schaefer