Dag Rosenqvist is prolific, both under the guise of Jasper TX and as part of prog-rock band De La Mancha. Closet Ghosts, his fifth album, offers a collection of compositions that are within the area of ambient guitar drone mediated by electronicia. This is a sense of reading music which is a fraught area at best and the results may very well arrive at the landscape of this album described as the farm that is laptop folk or nouveau ambient guitar based instrumental shoegaze. The signpost to the farm is not the farm itself.
To take it from the all encompassing words and to a more personal sense of music, private music if you will, conveys more of Rosenqvist. As such we can hear the melancholy, the echo of underlying optimistic brightness covered in layers of texture, not quite darkness as a cloth of static, field recordings, synths, organs.
It is not the arena of the all encompassing symbolic that joins people in groups and forms massives, but the personal expression that allows a freedom of expression, individual expression that is ironically the domain of the artist in the space of the small, private press world. It could be argued to be a massive in an ironic sense but a massive of individual voices is more of a confusion than a movement. Nowdays I only engage in movements in one room of the house and it is not the living room.
The great beauty of albums like Closet Ghosts is that they are brightly different, highly creative and opens the listener up to a brighter world amongst the melancholy. It seeks not to impose meaning but to engage the ear and the mind.
Innerversitysound
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