Tape – Opera

November 2002 • Häpna

Is it just me and my personal cultural bias or is there an abnormal amount of amazing avant-garde-ish music coming out of Sweden these days (as if I have to tell you again)? Okay, Opera is a ten-year-old album at this point, but still. This time we're dealing with what I like to (jokingly) call "folkbient"—light, airy, textural acoustic pieces. But that sort of undercuts just how captivating and plain good this album is.

Opera's sound is quite simple: light and floaty acoustic guitars accompanied by a wide variety of backing instruments and gitchy atmospheric noises, all played in a sort of aloof improvisational way. Yet the album still sounds incredibly focused, as if everyone has a specific job to do, and a very concise vision of what the end product should sound like—and it's gorgeous. Sometimes the music is full of electronic glitches and little spurts of processed sound, sometimes it's droning and somber, sometimes it's very abstract, but nothing ever sounds out of place.

Such consistency is probably a result of the fact that Opera seems to be a very carefully composed album, and the attention to detail is a big part of what makes it so good. This goes especially for the wide array of instruments that make appearances on the album: the random saxophone that appears out of nowhere for a few seconds, the harmonica, the accordion, processed strings, I could go on. They always seem to know exactly what sounds should go in a piece and aren't afraid to go out of their way to find something that fits, and the way that these different sounds and textures and noises build around each other and grow sort of organically... it's those kinds of details that make each piece truly special.

What else to say? Opera is simply excellent. Sure, maybe it's not particularly unique in its style, but at least it does it better than any other group I've heard up 'til now. Beautiful, sad, haunting, and worth every minute.

8

Spires That in the Sunset Rise – Spires That in the Sunset Rise

2003 • Galactic Zoo Disk / Eclipse Records

One of my favorite things about music is how I can have a staunch opinion about something, and then find an album or artist that takes that opinion and punches me right in the gut with it. Take, for instance, any genre described as "free X", such as free jazz or free improvisation or free folk. I've never really cared for them, dismissing most as sounding purposeless and incomprehensible. Enter Spires That in the Sunset Rise, an album I was sure I was going to hate; instead I got in interesting exercise in folky deconstruction that has left me a bit disoriented yet humbled.

More often than not, whenever I hear "free X" music it often involves the musicians randomly banging away with no purpose or direction and making a horrid mess that sounds awful. For some reason, though, on this album, I'm feeling a lot less like that; despite the fact that yes, the music is often a horrid mess, it sounds right. There's a definite mood being played with here: it's ritualistic, pagan music, like an acid trip that takes you deep into the woods and never back out. In fact, I don't think having more "normal" melodies and harmonies would make the music any better. Sure it's chaotic and unnerving, but it's done in a way that clicks pretty nicely. It helps that there is actually a lot of rhythmic coherence, so the lack of melodic coherence isn't missed as much.

I also really like the variety of instruments used; there's lots of interesting percussion with bells, chimes, cymbals, and such all over the place (I think I hear a hammered dulcimer in there somewhere, too, which is really cool). Even the more traditional folk instruments (violin, acoustic guitar, piano) are played a little off-kilter to match the rest of the music.

None of this is to say I'm enamored with this album or anything; there's still plenty about it I'm not a fan of. The vocals are especially annoying, and even though they do fit the music really well, they can be a bit too much for me. They use several different vocalists (I think) but they all have the same style, which often borders on obnoxious. And there are plenty of times when the music doesn't click and it loses me (though to be honest, the fact that this relatively uncommon is an acheivement).

I'm not totally sold on this album as a whole, but it has definitely had an impact on my understanding of how this sort of music can be heard. It isn't for everyone, especially not those somewhat familiar with the weirder side of folk (though it does make a nice continuation of Comus' debut), but it's another album I'm glad to have heard.

6

Black Forest / Black Sea – Forcefields and Constellations

April 6, 2004 • BlueSanct

It's been forever since I first heard this album, back when I didn't know anything about the pretty expansive obscure-indie-folk scene, and I didn't like this album at all, probably just because I wasn't familiar with music like it. Hearing it again now is really interesting and I can definitely say that I like it more now than I did back then.

Forcefields and Constellations is a very inconsistent album, which makes it difficult to listen to. It more or less sounds like a various-artist compilation of several underground indie noise/folk/ambient artists, as that's the genre mix presented. Some tracks are quiet, buzzing noise, others are ethereal ambient pop, still others are sparse folk or musique concrète (heck, all of these show up in the first six tracks alone). Some vocals show up on three of the tracks, which are nice but also sound a little out-of-place.

However, I should point out that the group is an acoustic guitarist and cellist essentially doing electroacoustic experiments with their respective instruments, so the amount of variety they pull out is really impressive. This sort of music probably shouldn't be held to the same standard I generally hold music to, since having a consistent sound is clearly not what they were trying to do, and each individual track taken on its own is pretty good. Not necessarily fantastic, though; there isn't a whole lot that really stands out (perhaps "...With a Man I've Never Met", it has a nice melancholic atmosphere going on) but there's nothing too bad either.

On the whole, it's a good listen, although one with a pretty limited audience (I don't really know any electroacoustic-free folk fans) and that kind of falls outside of the scope of "traditional album" due to its experimental sound. There are a lot of good ideas here that could use some fleshing out, and given that Black Forest / Black Sea have put out a few more albums since this one I probably owe it to them to check out one or two.

6

:Of the Wand & the Moon: – The Lone Descent

September 16, 2011 • Heiðrunar Myrkrunar

I used to think that neofolk was mostly an '80s and '90s thing and had pretty much died out by last decade and that there wasn't really much new material that was actually any good. But after I discovered the Danish project :Of the Wand & the Moon: (colons optional) I changed my mind pretty quickly. Everything I've heard from them has been great and original. Being released in 2011, thirteen years after the band formed, one might think The Lone Descent can't be anything but old, stale neofolk clichés but fortunately it's nowhere near that.

Compared to the other two albums by :Of the Wand & the Moon: I've heard, :Emptiness:Emptiness:Emptiness: and Sonnenheim, this one takes on a much more progressive and non-traditional sound. As is expected, several tracks are the good old-fashioned acoustic-guitar-and-muttered-vocals Death-in-June-worship thing (which, by the way, I think is done way better than Death in June) but I think this style is the minority of the music presented, as the rest of the songs have a more upbeat, almost-baroque-pop sound to them that actually works surprisingly well. In general, these songs are faster, with some drum tracks (some are decidedly electronic-sounding, too, while electronic instruments are generally frowned upon in neofolk as far as I know), major keys, fast tempos, unusual instrumentation, choir-like background vocals, and the like. There is even extended (and often complex) bass guitar in every song, more-traditional ones included. In addition there is even a track on the more ambient-classical side ("Is It Out of Our Hands?"), so there are quite a lot of different things going on.

The net result of all this is an album that, while still acknowledging its neofolk roots, realizes the need for fresh ideas and implements them in a very effective way. It can get a bit campy from time to time, but then again this sort of music has always been pretty campy stuff (both neofolk and baroque pop) so it's to be expected. It really doesn't get boring either because of the diversity (not having enough is a big pet peeve of mine that a lot of albums suffer from), although on the whole it does run the risk of being a bit too jumpy at times. The different style influences bleed into all the tracks enough that it doesn't sound like a few different bands doing a split, fortunately, so it sits right in that comfortable space between too monotonous and too jarring. Not many bands can pull that off well for a whole album.

To be honest I cannot think of any noticable flaws the album possesses, aside from the previously-mentioned subtle campiness, which is something I can tolerate for a track or two. Each style the album uses is pulled off magnificently. Funnily enough, the project's website contains the lines "No More Happy Songs!" and "'The Lone Descent' is without doubt the most bleak and melancholic album", two statements which are blatantly untrue as some of the songs here are the most upbeat and happy I've heard from them yet. Although, I suppose they are the sort of bittersweet sort of upbeatness, and they contrast with the more traditional songs making them seem sadder.

Either way, as I love sad and melancholy music I'll take this album in a second; it's a great listen and an excellent addition to :Of the Wand & the Moon:'s catalog.

8