Eric Levander Kondens by: Dan Osmolowski Fri:25-Apr-08 Label: Rumraket Year: 2008 WB rating 65 out of 100

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” It’s a famous quote and one that has not been conclusively attributed to any one individual. At various stages in music history, Laurie Anderson, Elvis Costello, Frank Zappa and Charles Mingus (among many others) have uttered, or have been alleged to have muttered, those very words.

Essentially, it is intended to be a criticism of music journalism. Costello even appended the qualifier, “It’s a really stupid thing to want to do”. The blog-o-sphere has adopted its sentiment to mean that the extended critique of songs or albums by so-called experts is unnecessary and that the music should stand on its own. “This is great/Sounds sort of like Modest Mouse/Here’s the MP3;” this is an example of the consumerist, lazy, anti-intellectual, fast food opinion that assumes that the audience is one-dimensional and too stupid to be able to digest anything more than the vibration of matter through the auditory canal. Of course all of these antagonists naively underestimate the history of music journalism in driving record sales and live performance ticket revenue. Not to mention the extended written word as an art form in itself. Imagine, if you will, the blog entry on Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s David, The Bolshoi Theatre’s Swan Lake or Welles’ Citizen Kane.

I digress; Eric Levander’s Kondens is an unusual album for Wireless Bollinger to cover. Strictly speaking, it is out of our frame of reference; it is wordless, minimalist, and only partly composed by instruments that are not at least 90 per cent semi-conductors and capacitors. Other proponents of electronic music, such as Boards of Canada and Four Tet, have made the leap of acceptability into indie rock/pop play lists through forward moving rhythms and, primarily, melody. These are two characteristics that Kondens does not feature in spades. To some, this would equate to an inane listening experience but they would be missing the point behind the little-known Swede’s second album.

To call this record soundtrack music would be extremely unfair. The album’s dark, bubbling and beeping undercurrents are punctuated by too many uncomfortable moments of My Bloody Valentine-style noise to qualify as simply background music. Levander utilises the organic tones of clarinet, guitar and piano in a manner not dissimilar to Alias & Ehren on their 2005 album, Lillian and his flirtations with drone and noise resemble those on Tim Hecker’s Harmony In Ultraviolet or even those of Fennesz. While the deft proficiency of those artists is absent, Levander is only young and there are many encouraging signs to be found on Kondens.

‘Sekund’s’ textured opening gives way to some delicate pulsing before ‘Oskärpa’ introduces some cavernous, plucked guitar and, later on, some buried melodies under the song’s climactic white noise.

It is during the album’s middle third, however, that Levander is at his most vital. ‘Tölvupop’ is built around several movements, all rooted in twisting and turning electronic ‘glitchery’, hum and buzz; a minimalist bass appears and then reappears, underpinned by the inner machinations of a computer’s central nervous system. ‘Vid Fönstret’ strips things back with a finger-picked acoustic guitar resting on field recordings and the distant sound of civilization restrained by technological advancement. Kondens’ peak rests at the feet of some synthesized human voices that swell throughout ‘Kvad’ and into ‘Hitta Hem’; the sound of impending harm culminates in a short circuit of sorts before proceedings come to an abrupt halt.
Unfortunately, the record’s denouement is somewhat disappointing and staid, leaving a lingering question mark over whether Levander actually had a focus for this work from the beginning. It is this predictable calm after the storm that leaves Kondens a few steps behind its rivals.

Coincidently, Levander is studying architecture at university and, upon reading this, I immediately thought of that “dancing about architecture” quote. To slightly digress once again, if one turns to the medical science texts we find that right-brain functions are common to both artists and architects. Think about the work of Spanish genius Antoni Gaudí; you can’t tell me there isn’t any a-r-t in the oeuvre of that a-r-c-h-i-t-e-c-t. Dancing about architecture is also a perfectly legitimate pastime. It’s art, for fuck’s sake, and those crazy bastards can justify almost anything.