Andreas Brandal — Hidden Rooms

Here’s an exquisitely packaged cassette from Andreas Brandal, on Tranquility Tapes; with effectively pointillistic artwork printed over the inlay and the blue tape. This visual element suggests a hidden magic - almost a Blakeian vision of the world; with the accompanying nine tracks, amounting to nearly forty minutes, marking out a similarly otherworldly space - albeit one very tied to the real world.

The order of the day is something akin to a “fake” soundtrack, in the popular area of 1970s horror movies. I can’t pretend to know a lot about Goblin (for example), but this is the territory that Brandal explores on “Hidden Rooms”. So, the sound is synth heavy, with acoustic guitar and bass providing a pastoral framework. Apart from a few sections of strings (either real or electronic) and some minor percussion/junk, thats practically the whole of the sound palette; this gives the album a very coherent feel - befitting a soundtrack - without hindering Brandal from creating colour. The overall tone is languid and dreamlike, often based around an acoustic guitar picking out a simple pattern, over bass guitar counterpoint and a lush bed of synth work. Its fair to say that “Hidden Rooms” never strays too far from this; in fact, one criticism would have to be the somewhat linear pace and atmosphere of the album. There are sections which offer difference, the more agitated, arpeggiated start of “Wormwood”, for example, but on the whole, the tape picks a path and sticks to it. Its perhaps only in the last two pieces, “The Dead Remember” and “Ghost King”, that a definite eeriness is created, though the imagined tumultuous climax never actually appears.

This is very solid work and doubly so, since we can hear clear musicianship and craft; not that these are always desired things, but, in a general area of practice where people often hit distortion or loop pedals and hope, quite welcome. This sense is furthered by Brandal’s use of recurring themes and motifs, sprinkled throughout the album. It is undoubtedly a very solid piece of work. However, as I suggested in the final sentence of the introduction, the magical world that “Hidden Rooms” conjures is hampered and tempered (to my ears) by its clear alignment with the soundtrack work of Goblin et al. This is very much a personal thing, which may well increase your enjoyment as much as it lessens mine. So, another brilliant release from Andreas Brandal, in technical terms; its just that I’m not overly fond of the actual content itself.