‘I kind of wanted to break away from the way I think an ambient/modern classical (or whatever we call it these days) record should sound like today. I’m a big admirer of so many different types of music and I somehow wanted many of those influences to shine through. […] we still could do so many things with the concept of what a genre is.’ (Benjamin Finger, A Closer Listen)
Not for nothing does Benjamin Finger’s google+ page have it that he has ‘by accident been composing music WITH A HEALTHY DISREGARD FOR GENRES.’ His early movements were charted here in late-2013 with the interrupted pianisms of Listen To My Nerves Hum. Follow-up, The Bet, though, is a different animal—one with genre-cidal tendencies that sees the Norwegian spring from that proto-pianistic platform into more radically altered formations—an abstract psychedelic post-everything of instruments, tape loops, field recordings, vocal fragments, and discreet synthetics crafted into quirky oneiric collages.
First up, “Faintheadedness” takes a lilting piano, familiar Finger food, and places it beside a horn-like swathe out of which emerge the sounds of chorus-mutating children. The shift from TRS debut isn’t marked at this stage, but the pianoid sound-collage vignette template is increasingly subverted, as forms fracture and shapes shift, prone to depredation, pieces spilling over onto each other’s patch. In a recent interview, Finger reflects on his muse’s meddling: ‘After having recorded the skeleton I kept trying different things to see how I could incorporate new elements that would somewhat lift or change the track in an interesting direction. I guess you could call it sound painting in a weird kind of way.’ So it goes, wilfully warped, a-swim in micro-melodies and shifting timbre, sounds stretched or time-stopped. “Kid Dreaming Landscapes” has treated piano figures drift queasily over a luminous backdrop, crawling with vox-wraiths, doused in glitch crackle, fragments mounting till eerie string shudders gather to dissolve into dissonant drizzle. On “Rosencrans Exit” vocal murmurs quest through tender tremors of nervous piano hum. “Sulfurous Fog” opens up with a woozy Boards-treading synth line weaving through staticky mist before rhythmic cross-winds blow across with string plucks and shadow-puppet whispers, only for all to fall down, melody leaving before properly arriving. “Bad-luck Planet” buries song flotsam beneath a drifting sample stew. “Nasal Breakdown” comes in comparative serenity, wafting wistful Barwick-esque warble (Lynn Fister) over echo-smeared pianoid wash. After “Angel-less Halo” flicks between freak folk and electronics, “Time Steps” emerges at a rosier remove from the eerier edges of Finger’s garden of experiment. “Care of Motion” sees the lighter ambient atmosphere dissipate into dissonantly droning strings and industrial thrum. A where’d-it-go vertigo of what’s-down-there air suffuses everything-but-the-kitchen-sink (the girl is thrown in) finale, “Horizonless Brain.” Through all the filters and fragments, most visibly in the constant via vai of voices, amid organic mulch and digital detritus alike, a steady element of the human remains.
Traces of musical influence abound—be it the fuzz-blur of Fennesz and Hecker’s shoegaze-derivations, experimental J-pop (cf. Hoahio), or Eno. Shared Norse provenance, to say nothing of a similar bent for darker driftworks, may lead some to invoke Deaf Center but this is quirky lo-fi hardcore, however eerie, compared to his kinsmen’s blacker mischief. With some finding extra-musical reference points—from the obvious (Alice in Wonderland) tothe more obscure (fellow-countryman Jan Kjærstad’s magic realism), despite reservations about you may find yourself drawn down through a secret passageway, and down rabbit holes into The Bet’s teeming tender-eerie elegiac–ludic dreamscapes. California’s Watery Starve covers its first vinyl release with suitably magic realist imagery in Christer Karlstad’s painting, which also lends the release its title.
The Bet is out now on Watery Starve.
http://vimeo.com/92139562
