I’ve accumulated a number of releases from Swedish “cult ambient enigma” and “somnambulant drift “ enthusiast Tomas Bodén over the years, as I am a fan of both his shadowy and understated dub minimalism and his seemingly unerring taste in finding unusual and compelling collaborators (Cucina Povera, Mayssa Jallad, Death and Vanilla, etc.). This latest album feels like a major leap forward, however, as Bodén “foregrounds a more insistent rhythm-based sound” and draws in a host of subtle and leftfield influences like “ancient Swedish pastoral music, Georgian liturgical chants, gongs, and chimes.” Notably, Bodén also recorded Älvgång at Stockholm’s EMS Studios, which gave him access to an “extensive collection of vintage analogue equipment and rare modular synthesizers.” While I may sometimes gripe about the fetishization of rare and vintage synthesizers, that particular opportunity was definitely not wasted on Bodén at all, as his nuanced mastery of mood and texture has never been more apparent than it is here.
This album is dedicated to Bodén’s grandfather, which makes it something of a sister album to 2023’s Fyra platser, which was dedicated to his grandmother. Unsurprisingly, Älvgång is similarly inspired by specific places dear to the artist, as the first half (“Strinne”) and second half (“Bjärtrå”) are named for the same “loose collection of villages in the High Coast of northern Sweden” where his grandfather lived. Notably, the name of the region changed from the former to the latter in 1980 and the album’s title roughly alludes to both the “course of a river and the passing of time in relation to the river.” While the nuanced conceptual differences between the album’s two halves unsurprisingly elude me, the “Strinne” side is definitely the one blessed with the album’s finest pieces, as it opens with a pair of excellent solo instrumental pieces followed by a couple of collaborative highlights featuring Soccer Committee’s Mariskaa Baars (“Strinne Tre”) and Carrier (“Strinne Fyra”).
In “Strinne Tre,” Baars’ sensuous and soulful vocals float above a hyperminimal backdrop consisting of little more than a deep and glacial bass throb and a wandering minor key synth melody. Gradually, however, warming ambient shimmers begin to creep into the mix along with ephemeral and celestial-sounding streaks of color and the piece takes on an erratically lurching and blurting rhythm. In the following “Strinne Fyra,” a single repeating tone is joined by buzzing metallic string drones and clanking metal percussion with dubby delay effects as it steadily intensifies into a churning slow-motion pulse. The best part comes near the end, however, as grinding and pinging metallic textures, dripping water, and reverberating sonar-like pings converge into a lurching slow-motion juggernaut.
The “Bjärtrå” side has a cool collaboration of its own, however, as Jabu’s Jasmine Butt takes the mic for the closing “Bjärtrå Fyra.” It takes quite a different direction from the album’s other vocal piece though, as it combines viscous bass throb, heavily reverbed vocals, snarls of distortion, and a waltz-like rhythm en route to hallucinatory finale of smeared, pitch-shifted, and sibilant vocal mindfuckery.
Notably, however, there is a lot of depth here beyond the handful of instantly gratifying collaborative pieces, as Älvgång is an absolutely mesmerizing headphone album from start to finish due to Bodén’s exacting production talents and his enthusiasm for vividly realized textures and details. In “Strinne Ett,” for example, an erratic kick drum thump, rattling strings, and viscous bass ooze provide a spacious backdrop for a host of flickering sonic phantoms and viscerally grinding and rattling metallic textures, while “Strinne Två” lurches, strumbles, and throbs its way to climactic swirl of smeared and ghostly dissonance. Elsewhere, the unsettling and queasy ambiance of “Strinne Två” feels like an outtake from Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works II disrupted by snarling splatters and blurts of acid bass, while the dream-like drones of “Bjärtrå Tre” evoke a streaking aurora borealis backed by an unstable marriage of lurching throbs and subtle pops of reverb. As far as I am concerned, there is not a weak track in the bunch, which is pretty damn impressive for music this understated, subtle, mysterious and deconstructed: the magic truly lies in the details on this one, as Bodén’s genius for making sounds feel vividly and organically alive makes this an absolutely mesmerizing deep listening album.
