Search - Svarte Greiner :: Knive

The mood is minor key and ominous. Very epic and cinematic,

Aquarius Records | San Francisco | 11/28/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Svarte Greiner is doom. Well, sort of. Maybe acoustic doom is more like it. And this very well may be the first time we've heard a record, or an artist that perfectly captures the sound and mood of the hitherto unexplored world of acoustic doom. Svarte Greiner is the solo guise of Norwegian soundmaker Erik Skodvin, who, when he is NOT Svarte Greiner, channels his less doomy musical emotions into an outfit called Deaf Center. But the dark and doomy loveliness of Svarte Greiner is what we're most concerned with here.



And the reason for that is that the music of SG is practically perfect. It's like that sound in our heads we've been imagining for ages but had never actually heard. Until now. The sticker on the cd namedrops Earth, Angelo Badalamenti and Volcano The Bear, which sounds interesting for sure, but doesn't nearly capture how beautiful and wonderfully creepy this stuff is. Imagine the music of past AQ faves like Jasper TX, Machinefabriek, Xela, Part Timer, that crumbling, hiss drenched loveliness, but then filter it through some dreary drowsy slowcore, Bohren & Der Club Of Gore or Low, but then loop it and process it and pull it apart until it becomes even more fuzzy and hypnotic, a Basinski or Tim Hecker produced bedroom dark ambient doomfolk record from Bohren perhaps? Sounds impossible, but Knive is all that and still somehow more.



From the first track, we were totally hooked. It's like the soundtrack to some ultra abstract black and white film, unearthed and projected in all its decayed and degraded glory. Everything is shrouded in shadow, shades of black and grey, back lit and rendered soft and indistinct. The mood is minor key and ominous. Very epic and cinematic, but somehow still understated and subtle. But definitely scary. And evil. But not overtly so. The record is bathed in tape hiss and record crackle and all sorts of gorgeously textured recording inconsistencies. It's some impossible tangle of mournful slowcore, twentieth century minimalism, and creeping doomy dirge, all deconstructed into abstract and skeletal, Basinski like soundscapes. Strings scrape and squeak, in the distance drift muted percussive thumps. Each track is a droning smear of sound, peppered with bits of random sonic clatter, everything wreathed in smokey cello swells, and soft swoonsome strings. Guitars drenched in reverb offer up the slightest of melodies, riffs are unfurled and left suspended in in clouds of dreamy fuzz, allowed to slowly fade to nothingness. There are melodies, but they develop at a snail's pace, notes stretched to their breaking point, becoming miniature drones of their own, but when viewed from afar, are actually gorgeously rendered, and evoke dark feelings of despair and further define Svarte Greiner's sonic world of wonder.



Elsewhere, gristled guitar distortion is dripped onto spare expanses of late night percussion, bells and chimes reverberate over a dense sea of swirling tape hiss, ambient backdrops sometimes surface briefly, rising up through the murk, wind, footsteps, the call of crows soaring far overhead, and amidst it all, haunting female vocals that drift amidst the decayed ruins, small glimmers of light in a world of utter black, giving Knive even more of an emotional intensity. So dang good."

Acoustic Doom makes its debut

Piers Moktan | Khorsor Elephant Stable, Nepal | 07/11/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Svarte Greiner is the solo project of the Norwegian Erik Skodvin, one half of the post-classical, electro-acoustic Deaf Center. Not as soothing as Deaf Center, Svarte Greiner's music is disjunctive and intriguingly unsettling (also evident in the grammatical malapropism of the title), which the host label Type choose to describe as `acoustic doom'. This makes for a similar effect to Xela's The Dead Sea - providing a spooky soundtrack against which to imagine stories of horror, desolation and angst.



The instrumentation is subtle, consisting of little more than double bass, cello and soprano vocalisation, whilst the use of sound samples is profuse. Knive contains a wealth of sounds such as crackles reminiscent of a needle caught in the groove of an aged slice of vinyl, a crow cawing, strange creakings, singular pluckings, or an aggrieved woman moaning melodically in despair, often with ambient minor tones fluctuating underneath to give the tracks coherence and direction. Any semblance of percussive propulsion is typically avoided, making a rare appearance on the fantastic track `The Dining Table', in which a kind of off-kilter, funerary beat is despatched as if from a misdiagnosed corpse rapping upon their coffin. However, the beat is complex, as if multiplied and deliberately de-synchronised, creating a rhythm that remains somehow regular and resigned rather than desperate and insistent, making it all the more disconcertingly hypnotic.



This description may sound unappealing rather than intriguing, as if it were just a commissioned exercise in manipulating mood for a film soundtrack, but it really is a strangely compelling record that needs no visual narrative to justify it. The sound is distinctive and original, and moody and evocative as it may be, it isn't at all depressing, it just takes you to a different kind of mood-space. Skodvin seems to have even spawned a new musical movement, cultivating similar talent on his own Miasmah label. Already Elegi has produced Sistereis, which utilises sounds recorded from underwater ship-wreck dives. Acoustic doom is a new musical idiom within the burgeoning field of electro-acoustic production, and Svarte Greiner is probably the best place from which to commence an exploration."