Another record that time snatched away from me and into the shoebox of maybe, whence it was nicked by my wife for a while and then rediscovered by both of us while searching for suitable kitchen music.
In a week of superb scuttly music and enormous BEASTS in our bathroom, Skuuge & Stavostrand’s Humla is winning the Morgan prize for insectoidism hands down, pincers down, antennae down etc. To think that Chris and I mourned the lack of electronic music in Sweden during our short stay there in July - although this does appear to have found its home in Cologne, by the looks of it.
Humla skips between texture and timbre playfully, and with sinister intent, creating a constantly shifting, ear-snagging aural mirage of modulated clangs, stretched chimes and arachnid basslines. Like a lot of this Kompakt stuff, the elements of surprise and novelty are done away with, subsumed, replaced by something much more fascinating: a continuous atmosphere of unease, which appears at first to be comforting, clean and 4/4, but then frays at the edges, dips at the sides, buckles in the middle, upending and questioning your bliss as soon as it’s created. Increases in intensity are subliminal and treacherous; the guiding sounds are barely heard at first, then they’re so there and so fatal that you want to go back and figure out how they stole up on you like that. The momentum created by the rest of the parts, by the way, ensures that you wouldn’t actually do that, in the same way that going back from a great idea and checking all the thought-jumps that led to it is sort of fun but ultimately a long and boring exercise.
Track 7,’Lonely at the K-mart’, recalls darkness, cicadas in a midnight car park just heard above a hum of traffic. Then it pulls the traffic closer and agitates the cicadas fiercer, and a thrum of bass pushes against your diaphragm like the palm of a hand. More sounds, gasped out, flickering out from a warm centre and vanishing into the night before you catch them.
And it’s not even night; it’s early evening, almost autumn. Yet Humla, which is the Swedish for bumblebee, has all over it the darkness of summer in a hot country. Its pulse is the throb of sunkissed eyes as they welcome the night and its filters are the suck of sea on shingle and the rustle of pre-storm winds through wires and trees. It’s a document of secret micro-worlds of creatures and machines; it’s what they do when you’re supposed to be sleeping.
I haven’t slept much lately.
Posted
by Frances May Morgan on Friday, August 26th, 2005
(3 Comments)
