Band: Netherworld

Album: Morketid

Album Year: 2007

Label:  Glacial Movements Records

Genre(s): Deep isolationist ambient

Website: www.glacialmovements.com

Rating: 9/10

Track listing:

1 DREAMING ARCTIC EXPANSES (09:16)

2 NEW HORIZONS (09:24)

3 MORKETID (12:33)

4 JOKUL (07:28)

5 NORTH POLE (07:58)

6 VIRGIN LANDS (12:47)

 This is the second release on Italy’s GM label and is a full album by the label’s head honcho Alessandro Tedeschi. It is a deeper exploration and evocation of an ice-bound world, especially as the title is “…a Norwegian word [indicating] a certain period in the year when the Arctic winter cold encases everything and the sun doesn’t rise over the horizon…” and is composed and constructed from field recordings of sounds derived from the Arctic area combined with voice samples and gentle infusions of electronics.  What is an alien landscape during the day is made even more so when darkness envelops it for the better part of six months and like it points out in the liner notes it shapes the life and the peoples of that area. Everything slows down to a bare minimum and hides itself away. This album captures the essences, moods and atmosphere of life within the northernmost regions.

There is a quietness to all the pieces here, emblematic of a pristine untrammelled beauty combined with a stillness that reflects the Arctic night and its cold grip. Think of star- and moonlight lighting up quiescent terrain, the snow-covered ground gently glowing as the wheel of the universe revolves overhead, sometimes accompanied by chaotic dance of the auroral lights wafting like chiffon across the wide expanse of sky. Each of the sounds utilised on these compositions has been transformed from the familiar and cosy into something otherworldly, just like the landscape does when under the influence of celestial orb-lit darkness, transposing everything into a dreamscape, apparent but not quite real. Repetitive motifs cycle through each of the six tracks but somehow this essentially underpins the quietude of the Arctic winter, a time when everything stops and rightfully shuts itself away in the warmth in anticipation of the reawakening to come – now other realities take their place, perhaps playgrounds for the gods and beings of the northern pantheons. Yet don’t let the beauty fool you completely, there are hints of menace even here, after all the cold can kill as well as preserve; the tracks “New Horizons” and the brooding ghostly presences of “North Pole” exemplify that potential malignity lying just beneath that surface of untouched perfection. But whatever the mood this is above all else a deeply felt, and on a personal level, deeply affecting, collection, as these are regions that whilst I have never physically visited I still feel a deep affinity for. This is a perfect soundtrack for my inner vision of the polar regions wrapped in the studded velvet of night – quiet, otherworldly, ghostly and affecting a wan beauty beyond compare. I hate to pick out particular tracks because like the previous compilation release that kick-started this label the whole album is of a single piece but if I had to point to  personal highlights they would be the swirling shimmer of “Dreaming Arctic Expanses”, the title track with its slow wheeling of the High Arctic night-sky & the steady exhalations of a world in hibernation, when natural rhythms slow their pulses and dream of sun-return, and the crystalline fragility of “Jokul”, reflections of moonlight twinkling like scattershot off the snow… perhaps it’s just the fact that I am reviewing this CD at the tail end of November, the northern hemisphere’s winter and the soundscapes here lock particularly effectively into that seasonal groove that signals the end of another cycle. And, perhaps the best and poignant track of all is “Virgin Lands”, the piece that closes the album, a final farewell as we turn back to look at a fast disappearing world, a sad  mournful accompaniment, reminding us painfully of what we would be missing should the world go as it seems to be going at present… it would be a great pity if this were to come true.

-[S:M:J63]