Vanbot - Siberia

Pitchfork 60

You can make music anywhere these days. Laptops can pack in all the audio-processing power of a high-end studio. Singers can roll over in bed, reach for their smartphone, and record a fleeting melody before the cobwebs have cleared; techno producers can bang out a beat on their tablet while they’re sitting on the can. Electronic music’s mobile recording methods have spawned an entire mini-genre of photographs depicting EDM producers peering purposefully at Ableton while in transit. But why stop there? For musicians of a more bohemian stripe, why not get off the grid entirely?

That’s the premise of the Swedish electronic musician Vanbot’s third album, Siberia. Gripped by the desire to break out of her routine, Vanbot—born Ester Ideskog—and two collaborators boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway in Moscow. Seventeen days later, they disembarked in Beijing with a bunch of dirty socks in their suitcases and a newly completed album on their hard drives. Everything that we hear on Siberia was written and recorded in their train compartment and at various stops along the way; to preserve the integrity of the project’s constraints, they opted not to do any additional recording upon their return to Sweden.

It must have been a hell of a trip. A short video documents the blurry romance of the 4,735-mile journey: lonely birch forests glimpsed through rain-streaked windows; waves lapping against Lake Baikal’s stony shore; horseback riding on the Mongolian steppes. Little of that actually comes through in the music, however. With the exception of the occasional moment of muted train noise snaking through the background, there are few clues to the context of the album’s creation aside from the place names used as subtitles: “On the Fly (Omsk),” “Collide (Krasnoyarsk),” etc.

Still, that’s logical—after all, a Matthew Herbert-style audio collage patched together out of clattering rails and shrieking train whistles could have been unbearably ponderous. And the record, which strikes a balance between electro-pop and more abstracted soundscapes, begins promisingly enough; “Not That Kind (Moscow)” weaves an appealingly mysterious spell, rocking and swaying with a gentle, hypnotic motion. The syncopated beat recalls Apparat’s crunchy machine percussion, and suggestive little details—a burst of clarinet, a squiggle of analog noise—break briefly through the echo-soaked haze and disappear just as swiftly, like flashes of human life glimpsed in the passing taiga.

But Ideskog and her collaborators can’t quite sustain that immersive mood. Perhaps that’s because they’re trying too hard to capture rail travel’s extended sensation of suspended reality, all those fleeting emotions of days and nights in constant motion. Tempos across the album tend to linger somewhere between andante and plodding; everything, from the synths to the electronic drums to Ideskog’s own breathy soprano, swims in a fog of echo and distortion. There are moments of interest along the way. The instrumental “Yekaterinburg” is intriguingly dreamlike, its wheezing organs evocative of a faded carousel. “Louder (Ulan-Ude)” is an appealingly wistful take on dream-pop power balladry, part M83 and part “Take My Breath Away.” But the album’s omnipresent haze of yearning never gives way to any more specific emotions, and Ideskog’s vague lyrical conceits—“Stay with me”; “Get lost and found/To float not drown”; “I didn’t mean to hurt you, no”—never quite measure up to the magnitude of the scenery around her.

As it happens, Vanbot’s isn’t the first album made along the same route. The French musician Thylacine undertook a remarkably similar project on his 2016 album Transsiberian, and his album is, if anything, even more unfocused. He goes to more effort to weave field recordings into his compositions, but there’s a fundamental disconnect between his melodic progressive house and the folk music he captures along the way. Vanbot, at least, stay true to their own muddled mood, and on “Close Enough (Ulan Bator),” samples of an encounter with Mongolian musicians are left as fuzzy as the remnants of the previous night’s dream. Throughout the album, Ideskog’s lyrics are preoccupied with ideas of distance and separation; at the album’s climax she sings, over and over, “I can’t get close enough,” as though all too aware of the gulf between her and the world whipping past the window. In his 1978 novel Picture Palace, Paul Theroux observes, “Travel is the saddest of pleasures,” adding, “It gave me eyes.” Siberia faithfully captures the wistfulness of the pilgrim’s journey—but it also suggests that the ears may be fickle traveling companions.