Turquoise extends, chromatically eponymous in aspect, over four tracks full of graceful washes of guitar-wrung tone-melt, drawing out slow flow melodies assisted, the press blurb offers helpfully, by ‘organ, candlesticks and more instruments.’
A cut above your average ambient drone clone, Tobias Hellkvist has previous, and substantial, form on current major player of the genre, Home Normal, who hosted his last album. With this in mind, it’s a surprise to find this his latest set on Small Fragments, a label that’s had only one other release (Chihei Hatakeyama‘s)—perhaps to lend support to a new project from a kindred-spirit, fellow axescapist Ryo Nakata, aka Ryonkt, the owner. Be that as it may, the Swede makes use of his new home to extract the full warmth and saturated depth of his sound by deployment of reel-to-reel tape. Turquoise extends, chromatically eponymous in aspect, over four tracks full of graceful washes of guitar-wrung tone-melt, drawing out slow flow melodies assisted, the press blurb offers helpfully, by ‘organ, candlesticks and more instruments.’
What you get are radiant wisps, celestial swells, emergent harmonics and evanescent motifs that spirit you away into somewhere blurred and blue-skied. Suspended feathers of guitar and organ-like sustains are as if diffused through a translucent veil. Sound sources are processed minimally so as to enable them to better realize glistening glides, serene swirls, luminous lilts. Turquoise configures an ethereal body in a slow-motion cloud-like drift through tranquil space, acting as an affordance structure for thinking. Or better, non-thought. It’s difficult to single out individual compositions, which somehow by their very nature elude attempts to pin them down, enveloping, lulling into a mind-free languor of pure tonefloat. Elsewhere a French blogger/critic enthuses of the artist: ‘Le son, rien que lui, et personne d’autre, dans sa plus spectaculaire, sa plus envahissante, sa plus sereine, sa plus puissante pureté. Symbiotique.’ (sounds better in French, but for the record here’s a google translation)
In sum, an album to savour and absorb for its perspective, its oceanic feeling. Though it does little more than drift like tendrils of fog, it is ineffably compelling in an age when transience seems de rigueur, when music and other objects of desire are flicked through, attention, let alone gratification, deferred. Hellkvist has created something here whose art is to remind of the leisurely pleasures of simply sprawling in sound, lost in music.
Turquoise is available on Small Fragments. [CD | Digital]
