My god. I’m not sure how much good this post will do, given that the release in ques­tion is lim­ited to 200 copies world­wide, but music this gor­geous and sea­son­ally appro­pri­ate demands to be talked about. Dag Rosen­qvist is Jasper TX and Rut­ger Zuy­dervelt is Machine­fab­riek, both of whom have albums on Lampse at the moment. Rut­ger has been self-releasing 3″ CDs for years now, and I’m glad that they upped it to a full album for this col­lab­o­ra­tion, as it gives the music expan­sive room to enve­lope the lis­tener in waves, crack­les, and melodies of win­ter bliss. As I’m typ­ing this, it’s insanely cold here in Ohio and I’m cur­rently fight­ing my leaky win­dows for some sem­blance of warmth. Does this music cure that? No, but it makes it just a lit­tle eas­ier to deal with. Instead of being about the cold and harsh aspects of win­ter, this music is about the beauty of it, the gusts of wind that kick up the snow in swirling pat­terns, the way that spaces seem more open and full of pos­si­bil­ity, the con­tem­pla­tive nights watch­ing the blue-yellow glow that per­me­ates every­thing. The lib­eral use of gui­tars lends a very tra­di­tional and folky atmos­phere to this. I can imag­ine this music being played while a man hud­dles by the coal stove for warmth in his long cabin a cen­tury ago. The elec­tron­ics sound like steps on snow, the nat­ural instru­ments like bells call­ing in the night. Not sur­pris­ingly, this is very Scan­di­na­vian music, moun­tains and twi­light per­vade the music. Most highly rec­om­mended. Try and get it as fast as you can from Dag him­self (who posted it insanely quick from Swe­den), Nor­man Records, or Aquar­ius Records.
“Gras Som Bryts Och Gar Av” (mp3)