Dag Rosenqvist’s Black Sleep pervades the room like a phosphoric atmosphere, an insidious intoxication. The Swedish musician’s sound, which for some years now has drank from a celestial alphabet of sounds (understated post-rock guitar figures, pulsating percussion, lo-fi production techniques, faint oscillating sounds, and electronic trills and fidgety figures), finds in it a newfound coherence and refinement of approach.
Black Sleep is both Rosenqvist’s most upfront (in the sense of the production and configuration of the pieces) and furtive of full-lengths (in the sense that as elements rise out from the rich patina they cloak others in dim, velvety shades). Guitar sounds – some of which are Rosenqvist’s most coruscating yet – and electronic loops generally rise phantom-like from a sleepy miasma. A symphonic structure is in evidence a good deal of the time, which is not to say that the proceedings are in any way grandiose, or that all singularities are distilled to bland result, only that many pieces portray a sure grasp of form and dynamics, which has a tendency to focus and envelop one’s attention.
At eighteen minutes in length, “Black Sleep Part IV” begins with small clutch of plundered sounds, which soon summon up overtone swarms around which brittle electronic tones flutter and glint like gnats. In time the textures thicken and darken and those dim rainbow clouds grow thundery for a while prior to a bright coda of plucked harmonics. At times over the course of the rest of the album, these finely textured electronic segments, which oftentimes spread like snowy cataracts, manage to erupt, rise to confrontational levels of volume and intensity, lull into a rumbling plateaux, and finally sizzle at near silence. All of the events arise and nip at each others heels in a balanced, regular manner, and yet there is a mercurial element to the sequence, as though each piece were like a somnambulist who magically finds its way to its unsuspecting victim. After a series of releases of mixed result, Rosenqvist’s plunge into a turbulent gush of black reinvigorates and cleanses his palette; his tristful musings once again prove unsettling on a variety of levels.
Max Schaefer
