Miasmah - MIA037 CD / LP

Erik K Skodvin returns with a focused new album under his Svarte Greiner moniker by releasing two side-long cinematic compositions, continuing where he left off three years ago with the album Black Tie. 

The Marble patiently sets the tone with a slow moving wall of strings underlaid by a warped bass line. A feeling of weightlessness covers the ground while empty space surrounds you in an embracing yet uneasy way. It’s a gloomy territory with an unexpected extent of grace to encounter. Time gradually illuminates several stages of light and dark before revealing a desolate wasteland filled with electric organisms. 

Garden strikes heavily with rattling string hits and low bass waves quivering through your skull, transforming the scenery into a fallow that is staring right back at you. This could easily be the soundtrack to a nightmarish sleeplessness if it wasn’t for carefully scattered comfort zones to be found in unknown territory: What appears to be violent at first soon reveals sheer reflective beauty. However, it is patience and repeated listening that liberate the aspired altered state of consciousness. Originally composed for Marit Følstad´s installation art, Moss Garden more than ever consolidates Erik Skodvin’s individual idea of soundscape. You can interpret his approach as an embodiment of the word Terrific’s amelioration: Developing from Terrifying over Intense to its modern understanding in a little more than two centuries. Svarte Greiner reenacts this metamorphosis within a single recording.

Listen