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CD Feature/ Jasper TX: "Singing Stones"

  Tobias

Dag Rosenqvist buries his crepuscular reverberations in a dream ground, a dream settlement, the farmland, where the unconscious is ousted and wonders at tiny trembles and dense windstorms alike. Rosenqvist never surprises such origins, but he falls into them easily enough, providing, in turn, a hardy melting of bleary, mildly discordant activity and feint melody.

The pieces creep along a tenuous thread, where content and method of delivery struggle, cloaking all in a motley medley of frequencies, contemplative uses of blunt, scattered sound, and intermittent flashes of vivid color. "This Barren Land", as so many pieces here, is a distillation of unrefined desolation that's magnetic in its compulsion and surprisingly poised in its delivery. As a whole, in fact, the album is not only immediate, becoming at times even physical in its use of dynamics between near-silence and discheveled noise, but well-rounded, particularly in comparison to some of his past works, which, though not without merit, occasionally came across as simply a loose collection of blown-out sketches.

For the rest of the album, an ample number of pieces serve as potent examples of Rosenqvist's basic approach to sound arrangement, where compressed hisses, minute crackling, plaintive drones and loops of hesitant, near-melody fall in and out of step, resulting in an appealing, if pedestrian, roadmap of loss, waiting and disintegration.

By Max Schaefer

Homepage: Jasper TX
Homepage: Fang Bomb Records