Review: Svarte Greiner - Black Tie

This is deeply organic music. Even the more surreal elements here feel like the phantom ancestors of living, breathing sound – vapour trails of flesh and soul particles, flickering embers of corpse ash. Slowly and patiently, each moment of “Black Tie” is inhaled in its entirety before the next action commences; I lean into the beautiful pluck of cello, whose strings resound with the warm, generous decay of a church bell. The piece is somewhat symmetrical: opening with wooden creaks, finger scrapes and distinct earthly events, melting into a river of reverb and spirit for its mid-section, before crystallising once again in its closing moments to return to its point of conception; it’s somewhat sansaric, tracing the astral ascent of the spirit and its inevitable reappearance in the physical realm.

Perpetuating the sense of being cyclically trapped between two states, “White Noise” carries me on the most gargantuan pendulumic swing between its two bass notes, which tilt the track back and forth like a ship in a gentle dawn tide. When the low frequencies dissipate, it’s like the gravity has been ripped out from beneath – notes drift into eachother and collide as atonal sound clumps, stripped of purpose and direction and seeking solace in a dissonant aimlessness. It’s a more calculated composition than “Black Tie”, and where the first half of this release submits itself to the wondrous metaphysical beyond, the latter plays god with a galaxy of monolithic sonic planets.