PECHENGA: Helt Borte / DISKJOKKE: Sagara (Smalltown Supersound)

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Posted on Jun 1st 2011 11:24 pm

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Pechenga: Helt Borte DiskJokke: Sagara

PECHENGA
Helt Borte
STS202
Smalltown Supersound 2011
10 Tracks. 34mins34secs

DISKJOKKE
Sagara
STS204
Smalltown Supersound 2011
06 Tracks. 35mins43secs

Helt Borte
Amazon UK: CD | DLD US: CD | DLD Boomkat: DLD iTunes: DLD
Sagara
Amazon UK: CD | DLD US: CD | DLD

Originally independently released back in 2007 in Norway, Helt Borte went on to sell just fifty-nine copies and could have continued to go almost totally unnoticed, wouldn’t it be for the keen ear of Smalltown Supersound head Joakim Haugland, who happened to stumble upon it and declared it one of his favourite albums of the last few years.

Named after a part of Siberia visible from their native island, Pechenga is the project of Rune Lindbæk and Cato Farstad. Both originating from the small fishing island of Vardø, situated in the far northeast of Norway, they have opted for very different life paths, Farstad remaining in his birth place for most of his life while Lindbæk moved away, first to Tromsø, then Oslo and Berlin. In 2007, they developed an appreciation of each other’s work and decided to collaborated on a common project. The resulting collection, which was recorded on their native land in just a few days, was then self-released.

There are hints of Ambient-era Brian Eno and Tangerine Dream scattered throughout Helt Borte, although the pair also evoke the likes of Biosphere, Pete Namlook or Stars Of The Lid as influences. Working primarily with analog electronic textures and sounds, Pechenga create wonderfully fluid and dreamy soundscapes, deeply introspective and icy on one side, yet gently expressive and warm on the other. Helt Borte is however not just a simple suite of mellifluous pieces. Lindbæk and Farstad arrange their sonic formations into gently swelling melodies, from the stunning Gitaro, where warm guitar motifs drop on peaceful waves of synthesizer, the delicate electronic shimmers of Snowflakes or the cinematic title track, which opens with hazy synths from which emerge a crystalline theme toward the end, to the cosmic-bound Pechenga, its seventies infused synths drenched in vast reverbs, or its more introspective counterpart Ultima Thule.

Far from matching the vast expanses conjured by their soundscapes, Pechenga contain their compositions into short vignettes. Pretty much every single track here is kept below the four minute mark, with Gagarin struggling to develop over more than a minute, yet these often seem to develop for longer, as if the pair had somehow, at least for a moment, managed to dissociate time and space.

DiskJokke treads on similar grounds with his latest offering. In just a few years, Joachim Dyrdhal has build some impressive credentials amongst the Norwegian cosmic disco and house crowd, with two rather magnificent albums and numerous remixes for anyone from Lindstrøm to Lykke Li, Block Party to The XX and Metronomy to Charlotte Gainsbourg, but for his third album, Dyrdhal abandons the dance floor altogether to investigate a series of much more ambient settings. Sagara originates in a commission made by Norway’s Øye Festival two years ago, for which he was invited to collaborate with whoever he fancied, anywhere in the world, on the promise that they would be covering all his expenses. Not one to let a golden opportunity go, Dyrdhal decided to head to Indonesia, where he intended to study Gamelan music. Things took a slightly different turn however, and he ended up spending two weeks in Bandung, Java, where he worked with a local group of musicians called Sambasunda, recording in their studio and collected sounds and field recordings around the city.

Sagara is not however an audio diary of Dyrdhal’s trip in the way Freeform’s Audiotourism documented Simon Pyke’s visit to Vietnam and China for instance. Dyrdhal originally intended to combine the hypnotic Gamelan rhythms with techno sounds and grooves, but a trip to Bali later on changed the course of the project altogether. Instead of confronting oriental and occidental sonorities and rhythmic patterns, Dyrdhal uses the sounds he collected in a series of parsimonious impressionist compositions, isolating delicate percussive sounds and wrapping them in sumptuous electronic soundscapes and blending field recordings into their overall texture. The majority of the tracks are entirely devoid of clear rhythmic sections, although Dyrdhal indulges in some on Golotrok and Panutup, both somewhat reminiscent of the cinematic approach developed by Vangelis, where he brings in warm pulsating bass lines and, at one point in the latter, a drum pattern. In between these two poles however, the textures are much more fluid and ethereal, recalling at times the vast atmospherics of Biosphere (Mandena, Sengon) or Klaus Schulze (Naive). Dyrdhal’s constructions are not as intrinsically minimal as those of Pechenga, but he still relies for the most part on restricted sound pools, which allows him to place the main components in each of his compositions firmly in the spotlight while retaining the fragility of his sound sources.

While very different in prospects, one effectively being a homely project, looking out, while the other seeks influences from afar to alter a personal vision, Helt Borte and Sagara happen to cover quite similar grounds. Issued on the same label, they could almost be two sides of a same project, yet they exist very much in their own right.

Helt Borte: 4.2/5 Sagara: 4.6/5

Pechenga (MySpace) | DiskJokke | DiskJokke (MySpace) | Smalltown Supersound
Helt Borte
Amazon UK: CD | DLD US: CD | DLD Boomkat: DLD iTunes: DLD
Sagara
Amazon UK: CD | DLD US: CD | DLD

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