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CD Feature/ Gustaf Hildebrand: "Primordial Resonance"

  Tobias

What pleasure do people get from listening to Dark Ambient? Why would they subject themselves to a music that is most often described as being bleak, mournful and desolate? Far away from the day-to-day rustling of the music industry, a whole cosmos has formed made up of the most dedicated listeners imaginable and composers perfectly happy with selling a maximum of 1.000 copies per release. In a sense, being an artist in this field is the aural equivalent of being a doctor: It’s a vocation, not just a job. If that picture applies, Gustaf Hildebrand would be chief physician in “Primordial Resonance”’s estranging ER.

Should you have a fixed notion of what “Dark Ambient” is in your mind, then this album will both confirm and confront it. As always, musical movement with regards to melody and harmony is minimal, with motives taking the shape of murmuring and wailing patterns, slowly shifting in time. However, this represents only one stream flowing thickly through “Primordial Resonance”. The other is made up of metallic scratchings, the deeply resonating drones of rusty cymbals, unsettling breathing, distorted voices, and the sustained tones of a ship yard. Both streams move independent of each other, sometimes overlapping and occasionally merging, as in “Ruins of a failed Utopia”, which integrates monophonic chant into a surrounding of asthmatically moaning and chafing noises. All of this is, of course, part of the genre’s defining characteristics, which Hildebrand himself helped to shape in conjunction with the cyclic law label. On the other hand, with pieces refusing to segue into each other and marked by an unusual focus (these six tracks clock in at a comfortable 45 minutes) as well as a surprising diversity and plentitude of ideas, this is more than just a repetition of a proven formula. Most importantly, “Primordial Resonance” is not just the pitch-black epic of sadness many will make it out to be. Associations abound, but the general feel is more of empty beaches in the moonlight, dissociation of time and of banks of fog opening and closing into an ever-deeper void.

Really, listening to this album is not about wallowing in self-despair or enjoying despondency. It is about accepting that there is something much bigger surrounding us, an infinite continuum that makes us seem unequivocally unimportant in comparison. The fear many people will experience when sitting this through is not the same as when watching a horror movie. It is the fear when confronted with regality. Painful it may be, but at the same time it is one of the most uplifting experiences imaginable being able to come near it – even if only for three quarters of an hour.

Homepage: Gustaf Hildebrand
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