Born in 1973 in Trondheim, situated in Northern Norway,
Kim Hiorthøy is a multi-talented artist whose
work encompasses graphic design, filmmaking, writing
and music. Perhaps better known for being responsible
for designing the covers for the entire Rune Grammofon
and Smalltown Supersound catalogues, Hiorthøy’s
excursions into the music world have a lot in common
with his visual work by use of cut-n-paste technique
to create intricate and wonderful narrative vignettes.
His first album, Hei! (Smalltown Supersound,
2000), used found sounds recorded around the house and
left unprocessed to add textures to the music and suggest
atmospheric structures. On his second album, Melke,
released in 2002, found sounds were once again bringing
Hiorthøy’s music to life by injecting diverse
elements of street noises and recorded voices onto his
heavily sliced-up compositions.
For The Ladies takes the concept further. Having
collected sounds for years, Hiorthøy came up
with the idea to collect some of these on an album and
leaving them totally untouched and, more importantly,
without music. For The Ladies is therefore
an album to approach with great care. Leaving the ten
tracks voluntarily untitled, as if he refused to give
any context to his recordings, Hiorthøy collate
a variety of ambiences and articulate them together
to create an imaginary location. Everything here is
about raw textures and atmospheres, about stolen moments
of life, from the rainy street of the opening track
to the recording of French singer Georges Brassens and
the park ambience of the fourth track to the barking
dog of track eight. This is a disjointed narrative that
Hiorthøy puts together. Each element seems to
be totally independent from the others, and often constitute
just a particle of a track, yet there is something strangely
compelling in all these noises and ambiences, often
interrupted by dense silences.
For The Ladies is a fascinating document of
life as interpreted by a visionary artist. From his
visual work, it is obvious that Kim Hiorthøy
relates to emotional patterns express through abstract
colours and shapes on one side, and slightly enigmatic
images on the other. With his records though, he has
often mixed abstraction and figurative elements more
intricately. Here, he exposes the concrete essence of
previous recordings and draws an interesting parallel
with the rest of his artistic manifestations, therefore
making For The Ladies an essential release
for those who try to piece the complex universe of this
man together as much as for those who wish to enter
his exquisite world.
4.6/5 |
