murkla - LEVIATA

Released: February 28

Delving deep into the realms of drone and psychedelia, Mattias Lagerkvist weaves a winding path of hypnotic noise and ad-hoc rhythms through seven tracks. It is rather eclectic in its approach to composition, with a penchant for hastily taping together (sometimes quite literally) various disparate elements of sound generation into odd and somehow surprisingly cohesive arrangements. Heard in isolation, no one track can really give you an idea of what the rest may sound like, except only in to vaguest of senses with the opening track, "Earthdiver" being a bit of a soft noise pastiche the relies heavily on field recordings and minimal electronic while the next track, "Fish Scale Cloud," leans extremely heavily into electronic territory with a rapidly pulsating melody and a slowly wobbling low end that tries to keep up on its own terms. 

There is a bit of back and forth with these techniques throughout the runtime, some tracks leaning farther into electronic exploration and others utilizing subtly rhythmic field recordings to create an almost tribal or ritualistic feel. Then there are tracks that seem to dive straight into the realm of amorphous noise such as "Pangea II" and "Leviata," both of which seem somewhat like a  wall that only occasionally reveals small openings in which the finer details can be heard. These themes repeated themselves in one form or another throughout the album but all all capped off by the final track "The Rain Song," a deceptively paced track that brings back that somewhat ritualistic feel the album began with now joined by an anti-melodic drone that oscillates in pitch randomly. But the rhythms of this track hold it together quite well, utilizing the sounds of hollow wood or bones clacking against each other and subtle variation on an already complex arrangement.