Linus Hillborg’s new album Remanens was written in response to a commission by Art Cinema OFFoff as a live accompaniment to Pierre Clementi’s short film ‘Positano’ (1969). Remanens is Swedish for remanence: the magnetism left in tape after the signal’s gone, the data surviving on a wiped drive. Hillborg made this his modus operandi for an ambient work where sounds shift like desert sand. Hillborg says he “found sounds on old cassettes and reel-to-reel, lost files from dead drives, pushed through more tape at shifting speeds and directions, then played through metal via transducers and recorded again”.
There is little for the ear to get purchase on in a conventional sense. Sounds drift in an out, sometimes as electronic noise, static, or ghostly field recordings which haunt the background, but these are often mingled with organic sounds such as the swelling clarinet and saxophone notes provided by Oskar Carls on the title track, ‘Remanens’, and its more disturbing twin, ‘Remanens II’. The mix is sometimes sweet, sometimes dissonant, but always intriguing and pleasantly disconcerting.
There are moments where you could imagine many of the tracks accompanying a dark science fiction film or an arthouse noir thriller. So much of the album must owe a debt to William Basinki’s breath taking and haunting Disintegration Loops but the final track, ‘4K Hell’ (featuring the heavily processed violin of Karin Hellqvist), put me in mind of how I felt when I heard Bebe and Louis Barron’s soundtrack to Forbidden Planet (1956) for the first time.
The collage and collision of analogue and electronics on Remanens feels at times like travelling through space (inner or outer) and, at others, oddly like being inside a kettle as it boils. It is neither a relaxing nor disturbing listen. I found it a cathartic sound bath which let the myriad vibrations it sends out dislodge some of the unwanted mental plague from my mind.
Released through B.A.A.D.M. Records: Website | Facebook | Instagram
Review by Paul F Cook
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