Varde

Album review

The fascination among various electronic and ambient musicians with the polar regions is readily understood -- silent landscapes of frozen waste in near total darkness for half a year lend themselves to work by performers ranging from Vangelis to Thomas Köner. Like the latter, Elegi (aka Tommy Jansen) has released an album about one famously doomed expedition, the Robert Falcon Scott trek to the South Pole. Varde, the second in a series of albums on the general polar theme, saves its specific Scott references for the liner notes, with the music concentrating on moody textures shot through with fragments of more traditional instrumentation -- violins, hints of bells, piano parts, and more besides. Calmly disruptive moments such as the polite stuttering chop-up on "Arvesølv" and the intrusion throughout of echoing pulses suggesting the fragmenting of glaciers and fumbling human attempts at stability in the void add to the unsettled feeling of the whole.
© Ned Raggett /TiVo