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CD Feature/ moth electret: "lil"

  Tobias

It is usually considered common knowledge that music bridges the gap between languages, cultures, ethnicities and other potential borders of all kinds. “lil”, however, prooves that it can also serve to make us aware of clear and present differences. A fifty one-minute trip of unfathomable implications, it leaves you confused and confounded after the last note has died down: Has it brought you closer to the man behind this or widened the divide?

“The next CD should be out by the end of the year, or beginning next year.”, Stig Berg (the aforementioned “man behind this”) mentioned in an interview, “It is a special graphic/music presentation done by mystery sea records and it will be focused on oceanic themes (although not really "water" like, more like where the ocean meets the land)” That was in 2002 and Berg was just promoting his first release under the RAAN moniker: “The Nacrasti”, still considered an influential Dark Ambient album and a work which attracts new followers until today. Then everything turned quiet around him. Daniel of said Mystery Sea Records mentions “years of cross-mailing” and creative debates about “impressions & field recordings made in sea/fish areas” imply that we can assume several new approaches have been set up and discarded. In the end, the graphic part of the project was dropped, even the group’s name came under scrutiny and after four years of experimentation, recording and composing,“lil” reaches us under the authorship of “moth electret” and extensive travels around the world: Sound sources include Eureka on the Californian coast, the harbor of Barcelona and Sandoy, one of the Faroe islands. Subsequently, the opening piece “cygal” begins with whirring helicopter blades and gulfing waves, before building up a wind of inviting drone phasings. It is possibly the only immediately recognisable moment, before Berg reverts to a totally idiosyncratic world of his own. The archetypical processed organic sound environment of other Mystery Sea releases is present as well, but it is almost as if Berg has made it the centre of musical progression, instead of a background item. Sustained tones come floating in an out of this impenetrable brushwood of either sharply metallic or warmly rubbing effects, sometimes even in a brusque and confronting manner. “kalaa” is a perfect example, an eleven-minute semblance of pulsations, hidden harmonics, gurglings, buzzings and tropical humidity – the blank spaces in between are equally important as the passages filled with action. On other occasions, things are more radical and take listeners to alien places, where “music” as we know it is substituted with ambient sonics and intermittent, elusive choral utterings.

Maybe these tracks will reveal their secrets over time, but I have a strong suspicion they’ll never open up completely. More than aynthing, they portrait Stig Berg as a man who sees amazing things were others see nothing and who is moved to tears by the beauty of sounds others consider insignificant. Have we come closer to understanding him after this album? It has hardly ever been as hard to say as with “lil”.

By Tobias Fischer

Homepage: Moth Electret at MySpace
Homepage: Mystery Sea