(July 2009) Skare is the communion between Fredrik Olofsson, Mathias Josefson (aka Moljebka Pvlse), and Per Åhlund (aka Diskrepant), who wield field recordings, found sounds, and treated instruments to discharge the Italian label’s commission to variously soundtrack quasi-static sub-zero atmospheres. This trio are evidently fixated by the sound of cycles of water-snow-ice, and the sonification of light reflecting from snow and its prismatic filtration through ice. Solstice City, Skare’s contribution to the evolving Glacial Movements iceworks, in fact pursues an audibly programmatic narrative, presenting an imaginary journey through a protean landscape at the nature-civilization interface, involving a traveler embarking on a ship on a distant shore to an unknown destination.
Opener, “To The Other Shore,” is a scene-setting prelude to the extended durations of two succeeding tracks/tracts, a backdrop of ambient babble, crystalline shimmer and low-pitched rumble against which is heard the protagonist, seeking directions. Captured naturalia – footsteps in the snow, seagull cries – bespeckle the beginnings of “Through Wind And Broken Ice” presaging a pall of permafrost. Drawn out dronings effectively depict a long slow journey through a frozen expanse, suggesting the bleak and the blasted with odd insertions of melodicism to hint at relief. The prevailing chthonic ambience is eventually dispelled with infusions of piano-tinkle, bird-chirp and remote auto-hum, hinting at civilization refound. Moving ponderously through a haze of whiteout, “The Snow Angel Factory” is reached. A distant plane is heard amidst the crackle and hum, after which ethereal drift cedes to industrial grit, musical material growing spectral, before ending swimming in a pool of piano and dissolved voices.
An hour of frozen flotation-tank deep listening, then, for those who still crave such fare. It’s not that there is nothing of interest here, but that for all Skare’s crafted atmospherics and immaculate conceptualisation, Solstice City barely distinguishes itself from a group of archetypally isolationist works of “frozen ambient.” It creeps around in zones already navigated initially by Lull (his Cold Summer was way back 1994!) and lately by Sleep Research Facility (three albums in this vein, notably Deep Frieze, between 2001-2004) – all slo-mo drone depths and dark engulfings; difficult to avoid invoking the presiding spirit of Thomas Köner, whose twenty-year old Nunatak Gongamur provided the arctic ethnography blueprint for these chilly soundscapes with minimal harmonic presence, and if you’re suffering the dearth of recent Köner work, you could do worse than Solstice City.
Solstice City is out now on Glacial Movements. [Purchase
