Swedish electronic player Jarl is back again with his seventh release for the Zoharum label, and continuing his general plan to depict psychological disturbances and turmoils of the mind – or else cause them to happen in the brain pan, with his intense music.
This time on Isolation Colours (ZOHAR 302-2) he’s doing it by forcing his analogue synths (in reality, torture units banned under the Geneva convention in 18 countries) to represent “colours” in some way. Grey, Blue, Black and White – and certain tones in between – are translated into sonic information with the imagination and creative determination that most psychologists would abhor, as they reach for their Zener Cards, free-association building blocks, and other tools to try out on their patients…to put it more plainly, Jarl is approaching the idea of “colour-sound” in a highly artistic manner, and doing it with his usual merciless repetitions, long durations, and unsettling chord patterns.
Few have delved as deeply into these nether zones of the ganglia and the subcortical nuclei, but Jarl has no fear. The “isolation” aspect of the release could refer to the solitary state which the true artist must endure in order to realise work which smothers the brain in such comprehensive fashion (it’s as if Jarl were determined to take over your very thought patterns and guide them down his own imagined canals), but it might also have a more sinister “isolation” subtext, if one thinks of the sensory deprivation chamber that was central to the movie Altered States. There was also the 1999 record Music For An Isolation Tank on Rhiz, one of the best records I ever brought back from my famous Vienna trip. Jarl may also have the “Ganzfeld” experiments at the back of his spine, those bogus tests which also inspired a 2019 record by Erkki Veltheim, but I expect it’s probably truer to say he’s following his own deep-sea fish as he explores his chosen squares on the chessboard. Also intriguing is the short “Blindness” track which sits right in the centre of the album, the better to make some poignant point about “no colours”.
Label notes indicate our Polish curators are evidently immune to the nerve-shredding terrors that I find in Jarl’s music, and they happily buzz away about “the sense and mood that colour can bring” on what they regard as a “psychedelic, hypnotic, cosmic [and] melodic” album. Six panel digipak prints colours as glowing red dots as if captured from the diabolical 19th century optometrist of Prague. A good one. From 23rd October 2023.