From Sweden’s finest kettle, Dance of the Aberrant LP (FIREWORK EDITION FER 1133 / ADAADAT ADA 0066) by Daniel Rozenhall, here styling himself simply as Rozenhall and cloaking this vinyl LP in a mysterious cover which seems to show the whole night sky cracking open in apocalyptic mode.
Few creators have done more to advance the cause of Swedish music than Rozenhall, with his work for the Fylkingen label and in the EMS Studios, and you’d be hard pushed to find a better practitioner who so boldly straddles the twin worlds of “dark ambient” and the extremes of more formal experimental electronic music. He never fails to deliver solid, well-constructed sounds, abstract morganisers peeled from the brain-pan of a colourfield painter and shallow fried in oil from Madagascar, such that the multiple layers of the picnic fall into place like so many riveted segments of a gigantic iron bridge. The two long sides here certainly deliver the metallic finish beloved of so many metal-eating music fans, who regularly munch their way through two metric tonnes of zinc per annum. Sten Backman has also created a film and “visual presentation” to further the aims of this bleakoid droner, and in fact the cover image is a grab from this visual version of his.
I like this record well enough, with its suggestive audio impressions of heavy industry on planet Jupiter and endless cosmic loops carrying us forward into a bucket filled with alien blood (whirlpools, vortices), but as a long-time listener of the Rozster for over 20 years, I have to say that he has been darker and more pro-active as a prophet of doom, and this one isn’t quite as ferocious as his usual skull-breathing fare. Once a merciless torturer who could remorselessly tighten the thumbscrews with his suffocating billows, Rozenhall surveys the disasters unfolding across the world in 2025 and the only response he can summon is a stern frowning rebuke. Limited vinyl pressing, jointly released by these Swedish and English labels. (27/09/2023)