Svein Rikard Mathisen / John Derek Bishop – Calm Brutalism

Curling Legs

Following on from this pair’s recent collaboration on John Derek Bishop‘s last Tortusa album, here they venture further into the outer reaches of sound construction with Svein Rikard Mathisen‘s deconstructed guitar reacting with or gently cajoling the found sounds and electronics that John draws upon.

The ten song titles can be read as one poem, part of a longer effort that Svein wrote over lockdown, and which allows the pieces to be consumed in a sitting, a journey that ventures from light into obscurity.

The guitar is the cornerstone for most of the pieces, although it shifts shape and varies in texture depending on the mood. A kind of cut and paste approach between warm tones and sparse electronic atmosphere introduces the album and the sense of Calm Brutalism is apparent in the varying sensations. The scattered found sounds allow the pieces to move between worlds, liminal, distant, fleeting.

The glitchy scurf can somehow be warm in places, with lightly insistent guitar-like impressionistic daubs against the unfolding repetitive patterns. The feeling of randomness versus structure is prevalent, but it is always an equal balance with dark shadows like pastoral obscurity spreading across a sylvan setting.

There is a gentle but haunted quality to the guitar, which then drifts into guided ambience like the discovery of a new world. It evokes the sense that each step the listener takes is treading further into unknown territory, but to somewhere that holds no danger. You can sense elements of Jon Hassell‘s fourth world work, but only through that unfolding sense of the undiscovered.

Distorted drones and murky atmosphere add to that brutalist sensation; the texture becomes akin to the raw concrete of structures rearing up out of the mist. The cry of the guitar and the stab and crash of the electronic waves are stormy, and where the primitive classical style appears, it feels as though two worlds are colliding, a schism that has its own energy; an odd, mechanical construction with the tiny patter of guitar steps or a mystery soundtrack full of suspense interspersed with glots of free sound dust.

Their ability to draw on so many ideas and produce these little vignettes is pretty impressive. There is a soundtrack element to a lot of it, but it is the sound track to something impossible to describe; as if it is awaiting the invention of something suitable. The electronic pastoralism that drifts towards the end fills with glitchy touches, but describes a sparseness that sees a hangar door opening onto a sterile interior. Gravity is gone and a distant alarm grants a brief intrusion as the other sounds strip back to pure light, leaving a hint of traffic noise as the only anchor to reality.

This is something that works better with every listen, the tiny details making their way out like petals unfurling after warmth and rain. It draws you away from the travails of the day and places you somewhere new and enticing. It is an adventure worthy of any sound lover’s time.

-Mr Olivetti-