Moljebka Pulse — Komoku

The music of Moljebka Pulse is a shimmering, astral cave ambient, glinting like gemstones and gold coins with a steady trickle of groundwater dripping upon them. It is the project of one Swedish man Mathias Josefson, a very prolific composer who has created countless albums since debuting in 2000.  For this new album Komoku, he is joined by collaborator John Bjorkmann.

The 'dwarfen caverns' aesthetic recalls Troum or Nurse With Wound, and the music is also sonically similar, with an emphasis on analog texture, improvisatory meandering, air sounds and luminous high frequency resonances (created by singing bowls, according to the liner notes). Troum's music is often sourced from acoustic instruments and then heavily treated, and this album similarly features ghostly wisps of trumpet, refracting in and out of an obscuring shroud.

Rather than strike a distinct chord within the twelve tone system, Molkebka Pulse creates drones with the often dissonant intermingling beat patterns between a number of faintly flickering snakes of resonance, mobbed together in a detuned metallic cluster.  In this way, their music is like Organum, who arranged drones out of a writing sea of writhing metallic scrapes.

As I've felt a distinct lack of 'magickal' nocturnal ambient since Coil's untimely death, I greatly appreciate the tone of this record. Dwelling delirious in the room between waking and dreams, time sluggishly passes in half awareness.  The tone is eerie, and the sounds seem to dissipate into chilled air, but remain somehow inviting and comfortable, as if this place is home.  There are no abrupt gestural sounds, only a kind of constant shivering and quaking of faint light, a shifting imperfection which imbues the drone with organic life.  This, to my ears, is the way 'psychedelic drone' should sound.

This is not one of those intensely sparse, barely audible 'deep listening' disks.  The sound space swirls with subtle but clear activity, and change comes frequently despite some very long track running times (seven - twenty one minutes). It is not only quite dense with sounds, but very cohesive, and easily believable to be one unified environment. The way the myriad sounds were all sourced from a couple of instruments and  treated with similar processes allows them to naturally coexist.

I highly recommend this album to fans of Organum, Cyclobe, Nurse With Wound, Coil, The Hafler Trio, et cetera.  This record is a functional tool for calling ghosts, or encouraging your spirit to leave the body on a heavy dose of hallucinogens.  It is a dark record that will none-the-less be quite comforting to those who spend their time on the shamanic fringes of reality.