Reviews

Igloo Mag

If Julian Kent undoubtedly represents the impress of experimental music when cello chords are involved in the compositional skills, musicians as Christopher Berg, Aaron Martin and Henrik Meierkord might constitute a forehead trio about neoclassical ambient music where the cello plays a major role. Henrik Meierkord is a well established sound artist based in Sweden and whose musical repertoire ventures from contemplative sonic soundscapes to quietly moving cinematic atmospheres for sustained cello motifs and a various array of electronic devices.

This new album is welcome by the excellent Audiobulb publisher whose musical productions bring to the fore promising artists and confirmed sound artists at international levels (Moss Covered Technology, Pascal Savy). The last few months have been quite busy for the multidisciplinary imprint with the release of materials by Ümlaut and Doroszenko; all of great quality with abundant emotional palettes of timbres and electroacoustic atmospheres that are superbly transportive.

MÖRK—which means darkness in Swedish—is a vertiginous and spiritually enthralling dive in deep bass cello tones, minimally improvised guitar sequences, long sweeping electronic sounds, and hypnotic loops. The result is constantly evolving, immersive and subtly dark if not eerie. Thanks to its glacial, languid and sonic meditative environment, this album stands at the border of evocative dark ambient, groovy electronic downtempo and complex electroacoustic music for the materialistic approach on tone colors. This effort will lead the listener to an irrepressible and overlapping oceanic surge. The pieces admit a great variety of moods, ranging from moments of elegiac purity, energetic ritualized trance, to tension and uneasy feelings. As precious albums from this artist, MÖRK offers delightful listening experience in the heathen mist of the world and Northern melancholia.

Link to review > HERE

Organ Thing

“November is here and winter is showing its first signs” so it says here, it was dark in London not longer after 4pm, it really does feel like Winter is here today and yes this instrumental album does fir the mood today, “Henrik Meierkord is a Swedish musician based in Stockholm, experimenting with different genres. With the cello as his main instrument, he also masters viola, double bass, guitar and numerous other instruments. His keywords in making music are pause, vacuum of time, the unconscious, consciousness, dream, meditation, a way of avoiding direct thoughts and reality”.

The title of the album means darkness in Swedish, we’re told Henrik Meierkord is exploring the deeper meaning of dark tonal depth together with his both classical cello as electric cello and other strings instruments, this time injected with his pedals, electric guitar and synthesizers as a unique sound. Not sure how unique it is, we do seem to get so much that tastes something like this, we seem to have some kind of dark atmospheric instrumental album landing here at least a couple of times a week, not to say that this is a bad album, far from it, but then very few of them are. This is beautifully painted, vivid, full-bodied, rich, it would make for the prefect thing to play at the current Ken Currie exhibition. It is something you need to hear in full, to let it unfold properly, you can’t judging on a could of the pieces, you need the full experience, you need that vacuum of time (and you need to call it something more than just neoclassical for heaven’s sake). This is a beautiful album, a dark album yet, but not darkly disturbing, it you allow it then it really is a rich state of unconscious warm. And that is a rather fine album cover as well, I think we said that abou this last album cover, it doesn’t seem that long ago that we did review his previous album – he’s done it again!

Link to review > HERE

Santa Sangre

To understand what is within each piece requires that Meierkord’s several elements are given access, sidling up into one’s emotional nervous center.

Gravity which operates inside a forced perspective outlook slides through an ominously yet terraformation’d region; each disturbance within the ether smoothly transforms. Every nuanced development is a splendid, ricocheting and perpetuating organization. Having leaked out from his own color palette brings me further towards my own considerations regarding what’s been birthed.

I’ve uncovered such a personal methodology; those feelings permeate.

This fjord has quintessential collided with those outside facets who move along those quietly moving fault lines which in tern subvert each variation. My own view is that I’ve arrived at a factory which focuses into each fabrication region, never giving a hint as to where Henrik’s imaginative impressions lead to. 

Knowing where these decisions stem from brings up twelve forces as if they’ve been waiting to emerge; sent from a darkly hued depth with no end of these fragments multiplying. “M​Ö​RK I-VII”  are strangely and relaxing exercises but only for a time until those meditations being to translate what emerges from beneath.   

Link to review > HERE