Talaboman - The Night Land

Pitchfork 76

Making electronic music is often a solitary endeavor, and sometimes, after enough lonely all-nighters in the studio, its practitioners find themselves craving company. The annals of electronica are peppered with what we might call “superduos,” pairings where both members first made their names as solo artists. Sometimes these are one-offs, like Mike & Rich (the early-’90s collaboration between µ-Ziq and Aphex Twin) and Supermayer (Superpitcher and Michael Mayer). Sometimes, the new projects become so influential that they threaten to eclipse their members’ solo careers, as briefly happened with TNGHT (Hudson Mohawke and Lunice). Sometimes, these outings give their members an opportunity to veer outside their usual lanes, like househeads Motor City Drum Ensemble and Marcus Worgull dabbling in kosmische music as Vermont. More often, they find their participants doubling down on shared traits, like Mumdance and Logos collectively engineering an ultra-reduced, hyper-abstracted form of grime, or Marcel Dettmann and Ben Klock cutting all the meat off techno’s bones.

Talaboman are Barcelona’s John Talabot and Stockholm’s Axel Boman, and the goofy portmanteau is strangely fitting. The crosshatched part of the Venn diagram connecting the two artists is actually relatively slim. Both musicians make a kind of house music, both are disco fans, and both are given to bright-eyed reveries (compare Talabot’s “Destiny” or “So Will Be Now…” with Boman’s “1979” or “In the Dust of This Planet”). But that’s about it. If the tattooed Boman sometimes comes across as the wily class clown, Talabot is the sensitive kid in the corner, distracted by his colors and his books. Together, though, something interesting happens. Their collective output doesn’t sound much like either’s work; it doesn’t even necessarily reflect the thin, convex sliver where their interests overlap. Instead, they’ve hit upon something new.

The album’s long, slowly evolving tracks tend to be more mood pieces than club jams, defined less by their beats than by the rounded contours of their synthesizer patches. Album opener “Midnattssol” (Swedish for “Midnight Sun”) is a scrap of Balearic cosmic disco replete with rain sticks and birdcalls, and it sets a tone midway between ritual and celebration, private contemplation and collective abandon. Half the set hovers around that languid pace. “Safe Changes,” an emotional highlight, toys with a Kraftwerkian melody and bubbling dub delay over a measured andante drumbeat; “Six Million Ways,” a hair faster, teases a slinky arpeggio out of a murky, slow-motion house groove. The album’s other highlight is “Brutal Chugga-Chugga.” As a pitter-pat CR-78 rhythm percolates beneath the keys, their synths gradually stiffen and sharpen; the Knife’s Silent Shout briefly comes to mind, and the sound of thunder occasionally peals across the background.

The musicians have said that embarking upon the project gave them license to buy scads of hardware; fortunately, unlike most kids with new toys, a remarkable air of restraint prevails. All that extra room paves the way for some wild acousmatic effects: Listening through decent headphones, the steady backbeat thump of “Dins El Llit” (Catalan for “In Bed”) sounds for all the world like it’s situated somewhere in the physical world, just outside the room you’re sitting in. It’s disorienting and damn near magical.

The other half of the album kicks along closer to house music’s usual pulse. “Samsa” is the album’s clubbiest selection, and—perhaps not coincidentally—its least compelling, flogging dubby organ chords and bass squelch over tambourine backbeats for nearly 11 minutes. Along the way, they flirt with a tremolo synth lead that's strikingly reminiscent of Carl Craig’s classic “Falling Up” remix, and while the extended climax might help explain why they stretch out the way they do, they could have managed just as much drama in half the time. “The Ghosts Hood” is more successful, wrapping a cowbell-heavy groove in burbling electronics and periodically unleashing quiet but expressive bursts of reverb. It's small tweaks like these, which subtly but decisively move the energy forward, that reveal the deftness of their touch. On “Loser’s Hymn” and the closing “Dins El Llit,” they keep the pace brisk but downplay the drums, and the results, a kind of dance music with its head in the clouds, are both invigorating and meditative—like the album itself.