Northhaunt
Istid III
We sweat global warming, but then retreat to chill music when the drum beats get too loud. There is no discernable limit to the amount of ambient electronic music produced, but it has an effect: it calms, it de-stresses, and it forces you to look away from the disasters around us to an inner peace. And where I sit tonight in a southern room where azalea bloom and oaks set leaves a month too soon, I can use all the chill Hærleif Langås can produce. Herr Langås produces sporadically; his press material mentions four albums since the 1990’s. That’s plenty of time to contemplate, and this project offers an hour of calm essence of Scandinavia. In front of that we hear wind-like noise. It’s modulated white noise, sort of like the image of small ripples in the drifts of snow recalling childhood in the upper Midwest. Those days are gone, gone for the foreseeable future. Here sounds are Germanic but not sing-song, they are not the Americanized Norwegian of the Wisconsin hinterlands, they are without time or space, yet they have nothing but time and space. And just as the snow-blind whiteness leaves you ungrounded and lost to freeze, tracks don’t even have names, just simple numbers. You are lost. You are alone, you have no direction, and GPS has yet to be conceived. Welcome to…somewhere. Nowhere. Anywhere. You feel warm… I’ll miss you….
