In its linear notes and album artwork, Varde makes no small number of allusions to the unknown as a distance more precious than any connection, as that which fosters an immediate and unpremeditated action and, in so doing, often incites and extends one’s ability to endure and create. In terms of its actual content, however, the album struggles to recognize itself in this framework (and, as an aside, doting press-release be damned, the album doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to either Gorecki’s 3rd Symphony or Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic). The tracks themselves are by no means possessed or otherwise gripped by the aforementioned anti-organic process, with its secretions, provocations and possibilities for renewal. Rather, more often than not, they appear content to reshape it in more clear and distinct terms.
Compositions abide by an organic process, according to which a sumptuous brood is born of gentle clatter and dragging sounds wrung from classical instrumentation, which time and again cautiously take refuge in grisly, windswept textures inhabited by faceless moans and indistinct echoes. There is a certain joy to be found in the elision of some of the textures and sonorities or from the odd glowering violin passage as it looms erratically over a frigid piano refrain. On “Den Store Hvite Stillhet”, furthermore, the languid, moaning textures even manage to get in among you, snaking, swirling, and circling around each other insinuatingly. By and large, though, the work here amounts to but a stationary change of existing types. Though it gives you precisely what is expected – a steady mood of foreboding and gloom – the vital salts have become somewhat bitter.
Max Schaefer
