(05.17.06) There’s a progression of events that lead to Tor Lundvall’s Empty
City. First, we build cities and railways and roads and
factories; then, we vanish from them, disappearing into the night.
Lundvall, riding the train through these empty landscapes, is struck
by their ephemeral nature — the way they are built and seemingly
abandoned. He carries home these images and paints landscapes.
These landscapes, rich with lambent skies and intense palettes of grey
and charcoal, became the inspiration for the ghostly ambience of
Empty City.
There’s enough metropolitan drift floating through this record that a
comparison to Mark Nelson’s work as Pan*American is a starting
landmark. But, I think Lundvall’s paintings are a filter on the
spectral nature of the abandoned — sorry, “empty”; this distinction
is, I think, key to Lundvall’s interpretation — cityscapes. While
the music is imbued with phantasmal swirls of melody and the
sepulchral echo of mechanical percussion, there is an indelible
fingerprint of color and heat still captive within these ghostly
sounds. Voices — acting as instruments sans language — exhale with
moist humanity behind them. “Night Work” reverberates with the steel
pulse of a train yard while vents of warm steam jet up into a slate
sky. There is work being done beneath the ground, human work.
“Early Hours” ticks with the metronomic pulse of street sweepers
smoothing the grit from the gutters, the long tone hush that descends
upon the still city and the echoing chord of rarefied sound that seems
like the echo of a party that got out an hour ago and is still quietly
draining away. It is the sound of that attenuated exhaustion which
rides home with the nightlife, whispering that fading echo of the
final flush of last call, last kiss, in your ears. A repetitive drip
of rainwater provides the rhythm for “Buildings and Rain” while
anguished melodies twist into awkward spirals in the puddles running
beneath the eaves. Sounds like ravens expiring are stretched across
rain-damp skies. “Wires” vibrates with electrical urgency, a organ
hymn raised from power lines and transformer stations; while “Empty
City” approaches the closet thing to a trip-hop tune, as a torch
singer who has lost her words but not her voice lets her lamentation
drift across the empty boulevards and still avenues.
Tragically short, Empty City is like a town glimpsed through a
break in the mist. Populated by ghosts and rife with echoes, you
barely get a chance to hear the whispered litany of the city’s hidden
inhabitants before the song vanishes. Rhythms you think you
understand decay into nothingness just as they worm their way into
your brain and melodies are simply phantoms of the daylight hours when
the sun stirs up the wind and the voices. It is the closest we
city-dwellers get to silence; it is the purest and most uncluttered
music we can hear. Lundvall captures this rich tapestry of evocative
ambience beautifully with Empty City.
Empty City is out now on Strange Fortune. (Buy it at Amazon.com)
