Musique Machine / Multi-Genre Music Magazine

Make some field recordings, load them into an input mechanism – DAW, synth, both? – and scramble their relationship to their sources (real or imagined) and poof, there you have it: a sound work. I realize that might ring a tad cynical on my part, but the formula has become something of a burden for composers looking to shape the barest means of production into something larger than the sum of their parts. It reminds me of the crisis of the easel picture in painting, or the homelessness of modern sculpture, divorced from its vocation as monument or totem. At the risk of leveling complexity – a risk, it seems, that anyone writing about minimalist electronic music is forced to take when confronted with the ubiquitous tools of the trade – I am tempted to argue that there have emerged, in the last ten years or so, at least two distinct families within approaches to working with roughly the same means: field recordings and electronic synthesis. One might be dubbed media-specific, and the other, narrative. Sure, there is some of each in the other, but I mean to underline the point of departure, the nexus, as it were, of making sense of what we're hearing when we sit down to listen to experimental electronic, free-form, composition.

Espen Friberg belongs to the narrative side of this equation, I would say. And without disparaging all attempts to cajole otherwise indifferent mechanical devices into the service of a particular story, Sun Soon, the artist's first full-length release, succeeds or fails based on its ability to conjure a centre, one which ultimately may, or may not, hold. From the para-textual references that accompany this album, we learn of Friberg's relationship to the visual arts (you see, my reference to painting and sculpture were not entirely out of place), and his connection to certain sites in Norway, from which the artist hails and where said album was produced. Without this information, I am afraid that the sound of footsteps, trash removal, and jingling keys, has no referent, for it is clear that the recording devices cannot provide such information on their own. Sun Soon feels at times spacious and breezy, other times, cluttered, and why exactly that is never really takes shape in listening to the work. Disconnected, save for their relationship to an author, Friberg's pieces float, rather aimlessly, in search of a sense of purpose. Maybe this is the point, though if it moves without intention or cause, I am not sure the effects really absorb the way they should.