Ever since Norwegian singer and art-pop provocateur Jenny Hval released her gripping 2011 debut, Visceral (Rune Grammofon), her most important musical partner has been guitarist Håvard Volden, a staunch experimentalist who’s helped realize her fizzy, ambitious pop. In her live performances she’s usually accompanied by several wig-wearing women, and though Volden joins her too, often wearing his own wig, he tends to stand off to the side behind a mixing desk—Hval is the focal point, and he seems happy with that arrangement. In 2012 the two of them made a lovely, mostly acoustic album called Nude on Sand (Sofa), but its sparse, direct songs increasingly seem like an anomaly for both of them—insofar as artists so unpredictable can be characterized as having a “typical” approach.
The music is sumptuously fluid, despite its odd instrumentation: Taxt’s rubbery low-end blubbering cradles bits of feedback, organlike drones, metronomic clicking, prepared guitar, and all manner of electronically manipulated scratching and rubbing. Picking out specific instruments is only possible here and there. The musicians collectively conjure shifting sound-worlds whose nubby textures and rich surfaces suggest tactile rather than aural sensations. These pieces are sometimes strangely serene, sometimes tensely fraught, as though balancing on edge and ready to collapse or explode any moment—but they never do. Muddersten make something out of almost nothing: their fiercely minimalist music blossoms with fascinating detail once you adjust to the superficial limitations of its ASMR-worthy sonic palette. Below you can hear the new album’s opening track, “Private Pleasure 1.” Today’s playlist:
