Gothenburg sound artist/composer/experimentalist Timoteo Carbone Hansson debuts for Discreet with a mercurial long player that shows that the magic in that Nordic water continues to run rich and fecund. Long time Discreet listeners might view this as somewhat of a left turn for the label, not unlike the Ratvader LP from a few months back in the sense that it seems to lo-fi avant noise DIY transgressions of much of its output for something slightly more melodically-centred and ethereal. Of course this remains defiantly 'experimental' music by anyone's estimations, though it feels born more of traditional musicianship than autodidactic practice, seemingly drawing more on understandings of ethnomusicology and Fourth World otherness than punk DIY abrasion. Synths and various woodwinds and traditional instruments - all seemingly designed and prepared specifically for this project - bubble endlessly and without an obvious sense of terra firma in that very Hassell-like shadow-without-origin type approach. It bears close resemblance to the work of Spencer Clark and, in its worldly perspective, Visible Cloaks, though unexpectedly I was most reminded of Lloyd Miller, even if Carbone Hansson appears to be operating less obviously from a jazz-rooted perspective. Like the best Fourth World referencing music, the appeal here lies in the essential unknownness of Gwethilu: Songs For the Dark Lake, a name that taken alone seems to connote a sense of alien terrain.
FFO: Jon Hassell, Memotone, late period Lloyd Miller , Monopoly Child Star Searchers, Visible Cloaks
