Pitchfork
72
A cursory search of Spotify turns up hundreds, if not thousands, of songs with the word “leather” in the title. The word “cotton” is not quite as popular, but it still turns up a bunch, and “silk” and “satin” are also in ample supply, while Pearl Jam, Beth Orton, and the Wedding Present have all paid tribute to the homely “corduroy.” But practically nobody makes records about Gore-Tex. Gore-Tex is not cool. It is functional, practical, preventative. It is the dad jeans of synthetic fibers.
The Swedish ambient-techno artist Varg clearly knows what he’s doing by citing the microporous membrane in the latest installment of what he’s called his “most honest and personal work to date.” The artist, born Jonas Rönnberg, loves mixing up conflicting signifiers. He makes records with titles like Misantropen, and his artist alias evokes the Scandinavian black metal of his roots, but he also peppers his Instagram with Gucci purchases, rolls of cash, and bottles of Moët. On last year’s Nordic Flora Series Pt.1: Heroine, he cribbed his song titles from the lyrics to Drake’s “Controlla.” (Some of this code-switching goes both ways: OVO’s PARTYNEXTDOOR sampled one of his bleakest dark ambient tracks on last year’s “High Hopes,” an example of gothic R&B at its most desolate.)
Look beyond the trickster antics, though, and Varg’s music belongs to a proud Romantic tradition where oversized feelings find their reflection in endlessly overcast skies. Early recordings presented a sound steeped in the loamy ambient drones of Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project and the flotation-tank acid of Plastikman, as well as the chattering, insectoid techno of Donato Dozzy, and Gore-Tex City ventures even further, twisting up those influences into a brooding sound that is simply and unmistakably Varg.
“Champagne Ceremonies” opens the album with gothic dread, wrapping minor-key synths in sharp-edged handclaps like concertina wire; “Yamanote Line (原宿)” is an impressionistic snapshot of Tokyo’s public transit system, with muted television voices murmuring beneath electrical zaps and a steady, rolling pulse. Many of the album’s more rhythmic tracks seem inspired by the experience of rail travel: “Platforms Surrounded by Fences (EU)” flickers like metal grates glimpsed from a speeding train, though its mood is less suggestive of Kraftwerk’s optimism than it is of the socio-political anomie facing contemporary Europe. “Snake City / Maserati Music” is not so much a song as a steady gust of wind that buffets the listener in an unending volley of sixteenth-note toms and hi-hats, and “I Hope You Are Still There (新宿御苑)” channels the same thrumming technique into something closer to the melancholy style of Autechre’s Amber. One of the few beatless tracks here, “Fonus,” with Drew McDowall and Alessandro Cortini, sounds like a memory of ambient music that is being slowly erased by the built-up din of the city—a sorrow that has forgotten its own source.
This would all be enough to make for an engaging trip into the depths of Varg’s darkest moods, but, in keeping with what his label describes as “a smirking fuck off,” he can’t resist pulling out the rug every now and then. In “Red Line II (127 Sätra C) 4,” the cryptic Swedish rapper Yung Lean warbles despondently through Auto-Tune about suicide, Adderall, and wanting to kill his landlord. It’s just the kind of collision that delights Varg—Lean’s noxious swag-rap smeared like sticky syrup across techno’s brushed stainless-steel surfaces—but it’s also a lot to swallow for someone who isn’t already a fan of Lean’s adolescent nihilism. “Forever 21 / Valium” is far more successful. Here, over pitter-pat hi-hats and new age piano, the New York artist Chloe Wise intones a piece of text from her exhibition, “Cats not fighting is a horrible sound as well.” Over drones as broad and flat as a river delta, she addresses first a bouquet of plastic flowers and then a lover, her voice flat and without affect as she skips from non sequitur to non sequitur: “Would you bleed if I cut you? Do you ever have to pee? Do you have ears? Do potted plants hear? When will you realize I am a tourist?” The music’s ominous qualities only make the text seem that much stranger, as though the quotidian had been mashed up with the symbolic—like someone’s chat history projected against an apocalyptic sky, or a brightly colored Gore-Tex jacket dropped along the roadside somewhere in Sweden’s far north.
Mon Apr 10 05:00:00 GMT 2017