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Jasper TX - Singing Stones

By Paul Baran ⋅ March 15, 2009 ⋅

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Over the last few years, Gothenburg’s Dag Rosenqvist has been quietly assembling an emotionally charged back catalogue of sonic naturalism, with releases such as the The Darkness and last year’s Black Sleep, making us take notice of an emerging talent. But his Bergmanesque take on a desolate ambient Americana has at last finally found its creative apogee on the Fang Bomb release, Singing Stones.

If there was one criticism to be leveled, it could be that Rosenqvist was somewhat too much in thrall with his influences in the land of Laptopia, in the guises of Tim Hecker and Oren Ambarchi. Yet perhaps there was influence from these artists in carving out his own voice, in the way that Renaissance artists would copy each other’s Disegno to achieve their own singular harmony.

Mastering a spare use of instrumentation from Dictaphone recordings to granulated wind chimes, Rosenqvist sets each piece up via the drama of atmosphere and through a slow magmatic positioning of sound elements. Carefully avoiding the earlier site-specific strategies of say, Brian Eno, with his landmark opus, On Land (1982), Rosenqvist elects a more personal mimesis through the politics of a small island community in Sweden.

“Stillness” begins with a distress SOS drone, not entirely dissimilar in its atonal urgency to populist film composer Hans Zimmer’s “Joker” theme in the film The Dark Knight, before ascending into a sunlit meta-stasis of drone and counterdrone, only hampered by the reliance of tape-looped guitar notes that, for my ears, seem a little too tried and tested.

“This Barren Land” ups the creative ante and the cinematic potency of the album is assured with gentle, processed guitar weaving in an out of imagined shoreline topographies redolent of Casper Friederich’s sublime nature studies.

The pieces stand alone conceptually and usually progress from catharsis to hope in tone. Weather systems seem to come and go like characters on the landscape as much as found musical objects. “A Box of Wood in the Storm” is one such piece that extemporises this approach, opening with a demented impersonation of Henry Cowell and evoking wild storms through heavily reverberated piano, before settling into two cloud-rolling chords.

Indeed, so powerful and pure is the melancholy atmosphere of these pieces, one is reminded of the final scenes of emotive films like Lars Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, or the 1997 film adaptation of Russell Bank’s novel, Affliction, when we bear witness to the brutal outcome of a family Stockholm Syndrome. The music contained within this CD would be the perfect accompaniment to such emotional catharsis, and for that matter a thousand others.

Dag Rosenqvist has not only outgrown his formative influences on this lovely record, but has found a way of creating a very special brand of musical humanism through an unaffected interface, between the human soul and inhuman technology.

~Paul Baran