Ecstasy After the Party
With the debut album Loud Bloom, Olof Dreijer – best known from The Knife – comes across as someone who never quite realised the party was over. Or perhaps realised it before everyone else did.
For years, club music has been absorbed into popular culture and its aesthetic vocabulary – imported into the pop song as energy, irony, and texture through artists like Charli XCX, PC Music, and the entire hyperpop complex. On Loud Bloom, the opposite happens. This is not club music disguised as pop, but pop music subjected to the temporality of the club: circular, lingering, and uninterested in quick release.
Dreijer understands something essential about repetition – the melodies are catchy without being insistent. »Rosa Rugosa«, »Plastic Camelia«, and »Cassia« are instantly memorable, yet the melodies never harden into slogans. The sonic palette is airy and almost devoid of chordal surfaces. Steel drums, gleaming synth figures, pitched tom-toms, and sub-bass drift lyrically through the music, while castanets and cowbells flicker at the edges. Even the vocals function more as texture than as centre.
The album feels constantly in motion, as though its melodies are being refracted through prisms that continuously produce new luminous surfaces. On »Lantana«, tones drift away from their point of departure like blurred watercolours – not quite microtonal, but with a sense of intonation as something fluid. Precisely for that reason, one occasionally misses an element of estrangement. In The Knife, Karin Dreijer’s voice functioned as a disturbing counterforce – androgynous, childlike, threatening. On Loud Bloom, the sonic world is more homogeneous and smoothed out.
Still, the album feels like an heir to the half-clubbed, half-pop kaleidoscopic computer music of the mid-2010s – albums such as Our Love by Caribou and In Colour by Jamie xx – music that dared to be melodic without the safety net of irony. Dreijer’s music believes in ecstasy as a gentle experience. It is music meant for dancing, yet somehow shy at the very thought of celebration.
English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek
The Perfect Storm
It is rare for an album to be complimented for lulling someone to sleep. But after a month with the album Cymatic by the Swiss-resident, Hong Kong-born Natalja Romine, I have often found myself slipping into dreamland – something I rarely consider a good thing. In the case of Cymatic, however, it is a clear strength. Yanling comes from the world of art music, and the work has already been presented in that context. Still, it stands strong as a piece of cinematic sci-fi ambient. Names like Jean-Michel Jarre, Brian Eno, and Hans Zimmer haunt the album, as modular noise clouds, female vocals, and mysterious electronic pulses and sine waves blend together to create a harmonious tapestry. It is not groundbreaking, and the tracks can be difficult to distinguish from one another. Nevertheless, the captivating piano riffs on »Transmuted« and the gurgling bass synths on »Nebula« stand out. On »Fallen Tempest«, choirs, chords, and reverb coalesce into a higher unity, and on the album's pinnacle, »Aura Nova«, sudden synth stabs threaten to wake one from the dream.
Cymatic is not a masterpiece and can appear on gray days as disposable ambient for a Hollywood blockbuster no one wants to watch. But over time, it grows into a brilliant piece of contemporary art, only suffering from slightly too perfect production and somewhat grandiose gestures. Why get upset over the storm in your teacup if it storms in the right way?
English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek
If John Malkovich Could Sing, It Would be Devilish Singing
»Please, conductor play and give me some fucking peace«. The mass murderer – and now a writer, as he became one in prison – Jack Unterweger (John Malkovich) demands more »old fashioned music« as he talks about his barbaric actions in the forests of Vienna. We are at Unterweger's book reception. The baroque orchestra Orchester Wiener Akademie sits on stage as witnesses, while Malkovich strangles sopranos Marie Arnet and Theodora Raftis with their underwear to arias by Mozart, Vivaldi and Haydn. Yes, opera is often about men hitting on women.
»I don't usually like this kind of music, it makes me nervous«. Yes, of course, because the baroque music played on period instruments is not just lame background music, but an active narrator which »disrupts« the sales pitch of a monologue, and the repulsive truth that Malkovich wants to share with us – the murder of nine prostitutes. He would rather be a murderer than nothing, he says. But the two singers also make him roll on the ground like a child; he gasps, becomes uncomfortable in his white suit. These moments elevate The Infernal Comedy to more than a clever concept (well-known actor, ok well-known orchestra, authentic murder story). The women gain a glimmer of dignity, while Malkovich's Unterweger loses it. Now what is he without Dandy sunglasses?
The Infernal Comedy was created for Malkovich in 2008, his joker face, his swaying, yes über musical voice. We want to buy his books because evil sells. As a super simple chamber music piece it works. If Malkovich suddenly announced that he now wanted to sing opera, we would also buy a ticket. But how would this story of misogyny sound with the baroque music of 2024?
Drums of Dissent
With her latest album, saxofonist and composer Maria Faust has put the political at the center of jazz, in the long tradition of Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Charlie Haden, Fred Frith and Tom Cora, just to name a few. What is surprising is her choice of genre, marches, which is not a per se a traditional jazz form. If Charles Mingus, for instance, payed his tribute to New Orleans marching bands, Faust’s choice is definitely antagonistic. The marches she manipulates and destroys from the inside are not of the entertaining sort, unless you’re a general, as they are of the military and nationalistic kind.
Faust’s score would be a perfect fit for plays like Alphonse Allais’s Père Ubu and Bertold Brecht’s The Resistible Ascension of Arturo Ui, in its use of the grotesque as a creative driving force. Faust’s genius however doesn’t lie in turning these marches into farcical circus fanfares, but in creating a truly threatening space within the music, through chaos but also heart-breaking dissonances, which could be heard as a reminiscence of the wailers mourning their dead fallen in the war. Her fairly large ensemble – seven musicians, plus herself – which is composed of six horns and two drums/percussion creates a perfect harmony-disharmony universe, as if Charles Mingus and Sun Ra had worked together.
Marches Rewound and Rewritten is a seminal and important album which shines darkly in these difficult times and reminds us that everything is political – especially music.
A Seedy Hotel Room Becomes the Stage For Lives, Traumas, and Music
Two chamber operas by Irish composer Emma O’Halloran, both adapted from plays by her uncle, Mark O’Halloran. The first, Trade, is utterly compelling and deeply moving: the story of two men meeting for sex in a grubby hotel room, whose intertwining lives are burdened by trauma and love. The composer writes of the »beautiful economy« in her uncle’s language and the same could be said of her music, which charges the text with more and more tension and urgency without cramping it – but just as often barely registers at all, letting theatre and storytelling rule. The vocal acting is outstanding.
The stylistic resourcefulness of Trade, in which the two characters are so vividly drawn, returns in the monologue Mary Motorhead but with less success. Here, musical sampling can get in the way of our view of the prisoner, who tells of her troubled life before she split her husband’s head open with a knife. Taken with Trade, though, it only emphasizes O’Halloran’s brilliance with theatre and deft musical hand. Would it be too much to hope for one or two truly theatrical, storytelling operas like these in the avant-garde strand of Copenhagen Opera Festival?
From Chaos, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten Weaves Musical Patterns
The keyword for this release can already be found in the title of the opening track: »Deluge (deconstructed)«. Here, Håker Flaten takes a Wayne Shorter composition apart like a LEGO set and reassembles it in a way that only occasionally recalls the original. Out of the pieces emerges a short, repetitive guitar motif, around which drums, saxophones, bass, and piano orbit in increasingly fragmented patterns. The melodies gradually become less concrete, the instruments interact less, the intensity rises almost imperceptibly – until everything falls apart and the process begins again. The same approach is used in the third track, »Kanón (for Paal Nilssen-Love)«, where tension and release unfold in waves that propel the music forward. Håker Flaten masters the art of creating dramatic arcs that guide the listener safely through even the most tumultuous passages.
This is not easy listening – we are still in free jazz territory – but there is a strangely compelling balance between chaos and restraint. At first, one is caught by the surprise of the music’s sudden turns, later by the joy of recognition as one begins to sense where the music sharpens and takes shape.
The album closes with »Austin Vibes (tweaked by Karl Hjalmar Nyberg)«, a noisy collage that slowly opens up toward fragments of more conventional horn melodies. Here we get closest to something resembling a classic jazz feeling—and yet not quite. It is still far from easily digestible music. But even when Håker Flaten and his fellow musicians move furthest into fragmentation, they manage to make the difficult-to-understand surprisingly easy to grasp.
English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek