The Merchant of Salt has a big, warm sound, an almost naîve, early radiophonic workshop charm and inquisitiveness, while remaining utterly contemporary in arrangement and execution.
There’s something Soviet-era and musty about the sound Andreas Brandal conjures here, and something mercantile and musky about the ambiance. The Merchant of Salt has a big, warm sound, an almost naîve, early radiophonic workshop charm and inquisitiveness, while remaining utterly contemporary in arrangement and execution.
For hundreds of years, salt merchants dealt in a commodity dearer than gold and Brandal’s album is redolent of enterprising but arduous journeys to distant markets along a Silk Road trade route of the imagination. Brandal is a fine storyteller without words. He can dwell on a sound with great patience, alter its timbre, plop round, gooey notes on it, or serenade it with a lazily-strummed acoustic guitar. “School of the Thread” is a distorted riff rotating on an electric-powered loom until its warp catches up with its weft and it falls off the frame, leaving the machine to continue treadling on empty.
The ominous, creaky motif of “Staircase” and descent into darkness of “Kinetic” hint at places not advisable to visit without a lantern and local guide. The deep, bamboo exhalations of “Chance Operations” paired with their synthesized shadow notes displays just how organic Brandal’s oscillation between technologies, cultures and perceptions is, and the eerie, industrial background against which “End Game” shears the air is painted in dark colours but in great texture and detail. Closing with its title track, the sense of distant marketplace is re-enhanced, strange as the twelfth century being broadcast over a transistor radio, until it effortlessly glides into a coda like a rural church harmonium, celebrating a safe return to Christendom from far away with the goods.
The Merchant of Salt is available on Dumpster Diving Lab.
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