Marko Nyberg
Ingrid EP
(El Camino Records)
A beautiful five track EP from Marko Nyberg - Finnish composer and founder of the band Husky Rescue - heavily influenced by soundtrack music, the landscape of the Scandinavian North, by his father's death and by his own medical emergency (cardiac arrhythmia).
The soundscape of first single Ingrid uses piano, a string ensemble and sounds redolent of a windswept escarpment to shiver beauty into focus. Opening track Drift is a jumpy, fragmented patchwork of neo-classical techno but with a thunderous pulse inflicting an alien sounding life into the sampled vocalisations which run over it.
Dark Echoes has a sung lyric, fragmented memories recalled in a "shadow of the garden" with darkly industrial sound keeping the human contact minimal, "our hands almost touching". Ljusdal is an elegant tribute to a location in Sweden, the minimalism here matching the slight eeriness of sparsely populated beautiful regions, the whole EP in fact could be a soundtrack to the sci-fi film Annihilation, similarly skewed landscapes abound throughout.
Closing track Our Land uses what is surely a terrifying, blaring alarm to punctuate its otherwise peaceful bed of sound. The fragmentation of human life, the fragility of our lives against the vast theatre of nature and time, these are captured somehow in this EP, his first release of this type, hopefully an album might follow and take us further into the forest.
