Andreas Tilliander – Lava

quiet details

Andreas Tilliander
Lava
quiet details

Andreas Tilliander’s run in the very early 2000s was just as good as a lot of the glitch and ambient dub that was coming out on Mille Plateaux and Raster-Noton at the time, but it remains underheard. Maybe that was because most of the clicks-and-cuts classics had already come out by the time his own releases surfaced, or maybe it was because as a Swede he was geographically a few clicks removed from the genre’s dominant German artists. Whatever the reason, Cliphop (as Mokira), Rechord (as Skokoll) and Ljud (under his own name) still strike a distinctive tone; imagine the austere computer music of Mark Fell, but funkier and twitchier, with loping rhythms that took guidance from Tilliander’s much-trumpeted interest in hip-hop and reggae.

His new album Lava doesn’t have much to do with this early music, or really anything he’s made before. Rather than having the electronics provide a structure through which sour chords can slosh, he plunges into inky darkness and then allows lonesome sequencers and laser zaps to meander through the murk. Portentous dialogue samples (“how do you feel?,” “I feel crystal clear”) bring to mind early Biosphere, but the sound overall hovers between the gauzy post-Gas / Stars of the Lid billow of latter-day Loscil and Rafael Anton Irisarri and the horizontal expanses of Steve Roach’s post-Dreamtime Return records. The impression it leaves is of being situated in a vast space, one that’s perhaps too vast to be easily accessible to humans: the bottom of the ocean, somewhere in the sky or outer space.

There’s a sense of heft and drama to this stuff—check out the strings on opener “Elmselden”—but it never builds or crescendos, instead allowing its elements to get lost in the haze. “Stralglans” is determined to ride its cracking, splintering synth line until it disappears among the noise. Even more precarious is the sequencer on “Nanna Bilder (Sidda Ude),” which at first sounds like it’ll be an essential structural element but then disappears entirely by the time the track is halfway over. Like its elemental namesake, this music has a habit of burning away everything it touches, and that caustic quality gives these eight tracks an unpredictability that’s uncommon in even the best ambient music.