As is often the case with soundtracks, musician and composer Søren Gemmer and the Greenlandic-Danish visual artist Jessie Kleemann tread a fine line on Lone Wolf Runner, whose music was originally written as the soundtrack to Kleemann’s performances of the same name in 2023 at the National Museum. How much of the original purpose (here, Kleemann’s performances) can and should be taken out of the equation for an album release to make sense?

In the PR material, the album is presented, among other things, as a postcolonial critique and an exploration of transcultural questions, which at first glance seems highly compelling – not least in light of the current geopolitical situation in which Greenland suddenly finds itself at the center. On a purely musical level, however, the release is not as gripping as one might have hoped. It lacks a stronger anchoring in a sense of purpose behind the music. Without having experienced Kleemann’s original performance, my impression is that the absence of precisely this aspect has left gaps too large for the otherwise, in many ways, intriguing music to fill on its own. Lone Wolf Runner is filled with references and hints of drama and storytelling that never quite come into their own.

There are nevertheless many interesting and exciting moments: Kleemann’s poetic voice, shifting not only between Greenlandic and Danish, but also between heavily vocoder-processed and seemingly untreated vocals. The atonal, hesitant, yet beautiful piano melodies in, among others, »The Dancer« and »Marble«, which create calm moments infused with tension. The industrial »The Skin«, halfway through the album, plants doubt about which direction the music is leading the listener. But in the end, Lone Wolf Runner lacks precisely what was cut away in the album’s process of becoming: a performance that can bind it all together.

To describe American Ethel Cain’s (Hayden Silas Anhedönia) stylistic shift from her debut Preacher’s Daughter (2022) to Perverts as an extreme U-turn would almost be an understatement. The distance from the debut’s gothic lo-fi pop to this monstrous work – combining dark ambient, noise, and dystopian ballads – is vast, all the while continuing Cain’s familiar reckoning with her religious upbringing and her struggle for sexual liberation.

On paper, Perverts is an EP running 89 minutes, but it feels like far more than that. Crushing noise drones, dusty piano strikes, and distant preacher voices from crackling radios are woven together with acoustic spaces. And although the record also contains more conventional ballads such as »Punish« and the beautiful »Vacillator« – which even features a clearly defined rhythmic progression – it is the long, epic ambient tracks that draw the listener into the often harrowing darkness.

One thing is that Cain suddenly makes dark ambient; another is just how good she is at it. Perverts is not only a profoundly unsettling insight into the friction between sexuality and religious fanaticism, but also an immediate, creative, and fully realized homage to a fascinating niche genre. A necessary album for anyone unafraid of the dark.

The Copenhagen-based duo Blaume’s EP excess air is a field study in the shared pulse of breathing, calmly taking a deep breath. The EP’s airy sound unfolds cyclically from the physical conditions of respiration, and with hoarse choral voices and chirping flute, the two artists – Laura Zöschg (IT) and Mette Hommel (DK) – wind their way around the healing and artistic qualities of breath.

Perhaps it is the strangely warm winter or the blooming figures on the cover, but excess air seems to carry a fragile sense of spring. The sparse instrumentation gropes its way forward improvisationally across the three tracks, and the many choral voices add a tangible physical sense of musicians at work, underscoring a feeling of tentative sprouting.

The electronic element, in the form of vocal effects and the music software Ableton, is an important part of Blaume’s expression. Vocal effects often come across as quite prominent, but when the processed voice on the track »vivus tremus« drifts into a hoarse rasp, the artificial divide between voice and effect dissolves, and the electronic becomes an obvious extension of Blaume’s shared breath.

Blaume’s excess air is a delightfully vital EP. It is music with the surplus energy to stretch far from a simple and immediate point of departure, and with a few simple means, Blaume’s debut emerges as a welcome harbinger of spring.

When I first listened to the Danish violist, singer, and producer Astrid Sonne’s new album, Great Doubt, I honestly wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. I immediately noticed how extraordinary Sonne’s viola sounds on the album – such a powerful presence that it almost feels like a deeply complex living organism, breathing, feeling, and moving dramatically through the album’s nine songs.

My favourite track was without a doubt »Almost«, where Sonne’s fragile, subtly intense voice is accompanied solely by the viola’s minimalist pizzicato melody, which reminds me of a forgotten composition from Japanese new age pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura’s masterpiece Green.

On most of the tracks, however, voice and viola are also joined by electronic rhythms, piano chords, and synth figures which, in contrast to the viola’s organic, vibrating sound, initially struck me as almost plastically artificial. To me, it sounded as if the viola and the electronics were being transmitted from two very different universes, unable to fully coexist. There was something about the contrast that felt slightly… uncanny.

Yet with repeated listens, everything begins to make sense. Sonne’s coolly understated voice is the glue that binds the entire soundscape together, as if it itself exists in the porous space between the viola’s raw natural force and the electronics’ tamed purity. I like it more and more – and perhaps I may even come to love it. Great Doubt is an album that, despite its modest running time of just 26 minutes, demands immersion and reflection – and ultimately rewards the listener for it.