Alog - Amateur (Rune Grammofon)
4/5
By: Charlie Potter
'This is amazing'. Those were my first thoughts.
I'm glad this record has made me feel guilty about not knowing anything about any foreign languages. We all know that as a country we are rubbish at language, but how much can we ever claim to understand about other cultures, and therefore the general culture of the world around us, without some sort of understanding of the way in which they choose to express themselves? That being said, of course exactly what music that makes its way over some sea does do brilliantly is communicate in a language we could all understand.
This is certainly an experimental album in the most definite sense of the word. These three guys wanted to see what sort of interesting music they could make utilising a woodwork studio, something that they went into having very little idea of what the result would be, and as a result of this openness and lack of long distance planning, the music is unconstrained, and judgements of quality have to a degree be suspended to the effect of finding new sounds before their predecessors can be dismissed. This recording has also been executed with a particularly high degree of concentration and sensitivity. This is where the consideration comes in the short term, and I don't just mean as it is happening - there is also a lot of space for consideration in deciding the instrumentation and things like whether the song builds or fades out are all decisions that can happen whilst sitting around during the afternoon, in the actual process of making the record.
Personally I feel that when listening to music like this it is only right to follow suite and listen with sensitivity, suspending critical judgement for a while. This is not an album I will listen to over and over again, but this is an album I listen to whilst taking an interest in the results of the experiment, and thinking about the broad range of possibilities the recording has opened up. This is the sort of music that gets quoted as interesting (in a genuine sense) and mistaken for unexciting. But can your own interest in something not excite you? Can you not have both at once?
That's not to dismiss the aesthetic of the recording, after all I would expect that there was a relatively high amount of post editing and possibly even post manipulation that was made purely for aesthetic reasons, not to mention the afore mentioned points of consideration that the fellas will have undergone.
The result is a quiet Clickey jingly highly involving piece of work. It's involving, because for a large part of 'Amateur' it's very easy to imagine these three gents sat around in a woodwork studio gently tapping things. Laptops and room ambience are often a winning combination whilst you can imagine yourself in the room with them, the laptop provides unexplained intrusions from another planet, occasionally leading you into wide expanses of unexplained sound that are like nothing of this world only with the very occasional reminder of the world you have left behind.
For those of you who are content not being able to sing along, or even hum a tune, this is a safe purchase. Overall what the recording really has going for it is the minimal manipulation. I admire the way they've been so thorough with the field recordings, unlike a lot of the artists turning up on labels such as Leaf, who are very good in their own right, but are closer to your average laptop noodler than a true experimenter. And true experimenting this is.
Stream five tracks from 'Amateur' HERE.
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