Solar Fields pushes the frontiers of his own self-created sonic universe one step further with another high quality album full of effective build ups with finely timed emotional outbursts and heavenly deep-dive ambience.
In a recent interview Magnus Birgersson aka Solar Fields said to me: “I don’t like to categorize my music in terms of genres, for me it’s electronic music.” I have to admit that with each album he releases, classifying his music gets harder and harder. Boundaries extend and get blurred, genre elements are tweaked and manipulated into new enhanced forms. Organic and synthetic beautifully collide, analog and digital maneuver side by side. The Swedish high-tech sound designer and multi-instrumentalist is back with his twelfth album—Origin # 02—and proves once again that he can still surprise and move.
Fortunately for us, Birgersson saves everything he works on, and that action led to the idea of reassembling previously unreleased tracks into parts of diverse yet coherent journeys, and allowed him to visit old moments of inspiration and ignite new ones. Origin # 02 is the second output that came as a result of this interesting process (there are 2 more planned) and features some of Solar Fields’ finest work. While 2010’s Origin # 01 was a bit inconsistent and scattered, Origin # 02 is crystallized and fluid. It improves with repeat listens, reveals more charms gradually, and slowly but surely gains a tight grip on its listeners, launching them to the celestial depths of the imagination.
Glowing drifts of spacey ambient, downtempo and progressive trance flirt with each other, generating sparks and tension. Electronically enriched post-rock roars like the crashing down of waves on rocks. Throughout the album all kinds of influences float to the framework’s surface, at times piercing it unexpectedly but fittingly. Birgersson knows how to create detailed suspenseful development and drama without being bombastic or pretentious, and without following any particular formula, respecting borders or obeying genre limitations. Origin # 02 shows that clearly. “…it’s when unexpected things happen that creativity starts to flow” (Birgersson said to me, also on that interview). I think that sentence perfectly captures the spirit of Solar Fields.
Solar Fields pushes the frontiers of his own self-created sonic universe one step further with another high quality album full of effective build ups with finely timed emotional outbursts and heavenly deep-dive ambience. The music is accompanied with beautiful packaging in the form of a three-part digipak with a 16 pages booklet, continuing Ultimae Records’ attractive presentation tradition. Some of the artwork was done by Birgersson himself like on most of his records. Origin # 02 is superb in all aspects. A work of a talented musician.
Origin # 02 is available on Ultimae. [Release page | Bandcamp]
