Other – Page 10

Norway’s Maja S. K. Ratkje has built a formidable reputation for vocal and electronic experimentation. Despite that pedigree, this is a performer who can still find room to challenge her compositional methods, and this latest release for Rune Grammfon is case in point.

Accompanying a Norwegian National Ballet realisation of Knut Hamsun’s 1890 novel Sult, to compose the score Ratkje ditched her electronics and employed a broken pump organ subjected to all sorts of Cageian preparations. The output takes the form of curious, and occasionally unsettling, drones and tones, over which Ratkje threads her distinctive voice, itself ranging from quiet murmuring to powerful rapture.

The result is a suite of nine intense pieces that have the power and breadth to utterly displace you. The urgent note clusters and noisy cycles that open a track like ‘et hvitt fyrtårn midt i et grumset menneskehav hvor vrak fløt om’ (roughly translating as ‘a white lighthouse in a muddy sea of humans where wrecks floated about’) will either quicken your pulse with restless energy or cause massive panic depending on the way you approach it. Closing track ‘Kristiania’ is perhaps the most fragile, unadorned moment here, containing a wistfulness that disguises a turbulent, volatile centre.

Sult by Maja S. K. Ratkje is released by Rune Grammofon on March 8 2019.

Words: Mat Smith

The central figure in The Silver Field is Coral Rose, whose debut album for Tim Burgess’s O Genesis imprint concerns itself with the metaphorical act of leaving a home, and the metaphorical rooms of that home that begat the album’s title.

Composed of off-kilter tape loops and an anything-goes approach to sound layering – everything from strings to the queasy drones of a bagpipe chanter – Rooms is a captivating progression through an ethereal landscape lying somewhere between organic, mystical folk and an electronically-enhanced post-modern ambience thanks to heavy processing and the deployment of a breath-controlled analogue synth. The effect on tracks like ‘Gost’ is to draw you into a dense, undulating web of sonic events – clattering sounds and percussive micro-noises, a gently repeating guitar, low vocals and patches of jarring discordance.

The instrumental lamentation of ‘Rosebud’, a pairing of acoustic guitar and unpredictable, noisy interventions sounding not unlike a distorted, reverb-drenched recording of a bow being dragged across a metal bench, is nothing short of an heartbreaking, arresting moment among arresting, heartbreaking moments. It is on ‘Nourish’ when the album’s electronic dimension presents itself most clearly, with a spiralling, eddying array of echoing crystalline sequences rapidly circling a mournful, affecting vocal.

Rooms is out now on O Genesis.

Words: Mat Smith
(c) 2019 Further.

Further.

Tag: Other

Maja S. K. Ratkje – Sult

The Silver Field – Rooms