The Helen Scarsdale Agency
So Long is an often subtle work of suggestively imaginative electronics which offers to transport the listener to places where they are equally welcome to apply their own meaning as to take those proposed by both the music and its naming. Drifting along without a seeming care in the world, Stilluppsteypa‘s Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson seems unconcerned how long his journey will take, if a track title like “Eight Hour Delay” is any indication of the mood being conjured here.
Slowness is the order of the day, so being a third of a day behind doesn’t seem like too much of a problem when the music is this languid, this relaxed. At nearly thirty minutes duration, the chances that the listener is going to be in a hurry to get the track over and done with are hopefully even less than Sigmarsson was in to get it completed; but he’s evidently content to take his time, to feel out how the
sounds unfold from quietly present to hollowly, reverberantly dense and to enjoy the journey as it comes.
While “Eight Hour Delay” could possibly also refer to some of the lengthy effects used to slur and slide tones from the realm of the harmonic into the sensorily-surrounding, “The Trip”, weighing in at a slightly lighter twenty-four minutes, elevates gradually from ethereal magnitude via impressively droning and buzzing chords towards an unknown goal with all the horizon-fixated purpose of an interstellar pilot settling in for the duration. Along the way, mysterious electronic engines shift phases and haul some serious distance, and in-flight music is glimpsed among the cosmic contrails while in ascendant luxury synthetic travel mode intersecting with arpeggiating flurries that bounce softly along to the sometimes seething propulsive whirr. Eventually, the hyperspatial calm is broached and what might be the approach destination is announced at some length as the brakes are applied slowly, if none too quietly, leading into a hefty — and possibly not entirely safe — termination.
For the finale, Sigmarsson describes a “Late Night Arrival” among a field of accreting, hazily-perused drones wrapped up in a suitably somnolent hiss and cracklescape which passes through with the uncertain wooziness of travelling while captured within the occulted miasma of sleep paralysis. But thankfully, the actual end is far less uncertain and disorienting, fading relievedly into slumber guided by the gentle arms of an angelectronic choir.
-Linus Tossio-
So Long is an often subtle work of suggestively imaginative electronics which offers to transport the listener to places where they are equally welcome to apply their own meaning as to take those proposed by both the music and its naming. Drifting along without a seeming care in the world, Stilluppsteypa‘s Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson seems unconcerned how long his journey will take, if a track title like “Eight Hour Delay” is any indication of the mood being conjured here.
