Hand-Painted sleeve
Discreet describe their latest release, an across borders collaboration between a select few known and lesser known Swedish and Danish artists, as 'marvellous peak summer music' and in doing so render near-all other descriptors superfluous. Well, almost… As with everything connected to the world of Gustaf Dicksson (he of Blod), everything isn’t quite as it seems. There’s a pastoral beauty to this particular melange of synths, piano, saxophone and field recordings that disguises an uneasy feeling, of something just a little askew occurring just out of view. A certain sadness, even. The spoken word interjections that are introduced in the record’s second half give the game away, poetic ruminations on the hauntings of morality that reflect on the profundities and melancholy of nature’s life cycles - if this is summer music, then it’s also music that knows that that same summer is always just slipping away, a summer long since passed… We’re invited to “imagine being haunted by the ghost of every living thing”, and the feeling is palpable because aren’t ghosts just the manifestation of loss? It’s that emotional breadth that gives Stilla Dagar, Stilla Nätter/Stille Dage, Stille Nætter its power. Perhaps consider it Discreet’s From Gardens Where We Feel Insecure. Hand-painted sleeve edition, 90 copies.
FFO: Blod, Gothenburg Sound Workshop, Deuter, Virginia Astley
