Moljebka Pvlse from Sweden has never disappointed me with its experimental, organic soundscapes. This time the project run by Mathias Josefson releases an album in a wonderful packaging on a rather unknown label, Fifth Week Records.
As I said before, the packaging looks nice: ‘Dunkl’ comes in an A5- format sleeve with artwork consisting of dark branches, that almost look like barbed wire. The cd contains three tracks, of which the middle one takes up more than 50 minutes. For this release Josefson is joined by Karin Jacobsen of a band called Les Issambres, who takes care of ‘instruments and voices’.
The first track ‘Rvin’ is a gentle floating ambient piece which sounds quite harmonic. The title track has a more experimental musique concrete-like approach, with a soft background drone, heavy manipulated field samples and crackling sounds. The track starts rather minimal, but gets louder and more densily layered after a while. Quite noteworthy are the prominent role for looped voices, not in a conventional singing style, but in a twisted whispered manner, as well as spoken word samples. It gives the music a very spooky character, evoking images of nervous walks through dark forests. Quite an intense affair and as the song evolves it only gets darker and noisier, with new sound ingredients from obscure sources coming and going. It seems to head for complete cacaphony, but it slowly comes to a more controlled ending. In comparison the more restrained final soundscape ‘Sprl’ seems to be almost melodic and moving.
‘Dunkl’ is not one of the more accessible creations I’ve heard of Moljebka Pvlse, but it is certainly a well-crafted album, which forces you to listen with a lot of concentration.
