Moljebka Pvlse ‘Heaven’s Great Dome’ 2CD ICR DISTRIBUTION

For a while Mathias Josefson changed from the band moniker to his name and now seemed to have switched back; unless there are other motivations at play that I may not understand. Here he has a double CD, which contains one disc with three long pieces with the overall title ‘Heaven’s Great Dome’ and the second contains six remixes/transformations/deconstructions by others, called ‘Discourse On Deconstruction’. For his three-piece suite, he got help from Hara Alonso (piano) and Isabel Fogelklou (singing bowls), while Josefson takes the credit for ‘tapes and drones’. If I would have heard that somebody is wielding a church organ here, I would have also believed it. It is not easy to hear the bowls and piano in here, but surely they are there, sometimes on a different level, remotely present and maybe they too have been treated beyond recognition. On “Places Of Memory’ they are surely present, not embedded entirely by the world of drones but in the other two pieces not easily heard. ‘Remarks On Rural Scenery’ is the one in which at one point the mighty church organ rings out loud and clear and on the title, there is room for some more field recordings from the Swedish countryside. In both three pieces, all twenty to twenty-six minutes, there is an urgency to be noticed; this is not just some gentle drone music, but rather a force to be reckoned with. This is some pretty strong music.

  The second disc is, as said, called ‘Discourse On Deconstruction’, which is another word for a remix, rework or recycling. The latter is the word we used in the 80s when musicians send each other tapes with basic sounds and ‘distant structures’ (to borrow P16.D4’s phrase from their second LP ‘Distruct’) would arise. The artists here all received a bunch of sounds from Josefson from the material used on ‘Heaven’s Great Dome’ and ‘Discourse On Lightness’, with the liberty to do whatever they wanted. I should think that Josefson chose artists close to his heart and not some opposed ones; no stomping floor filler here. These are artists who work with electronics, drone and field recordings, each in their way and with some overlaps in approaches, but that seems hard to avoid. The musicians are Troum, Phil Knight (also known as The Silverman from The Legendary Pink Dots), Daniel Menche and Colin Potter as, perhaps, the more usual suspects but Isabel Fogelklou also makes a return (adding singing bowls, I wonder?) and there is a contribution by Marja-Leena Sillanpaa. Elements from the original pieces return in these remixes, take on a different shape and morphed into something else. The details that make up the differences include Knight opening the window of his apartment and adding street and bird calls to the mix in a very subdued piece of music, whereas Menche emphasis the gentle harshness of the stringed drones via a complex web of sounds and Sillanpaa creates a curious mix of single tones intertwining. The other three are more traditional blocks of drone music, which is reflected by the fact that these are longer than the other three. It all makes a finely balanced release, not just the recycled versions, but also in combination with the three originals.