#arjunamusic

Bang + Honoré + Aarset + Rohrer – Dark Star Safari.   2019 : Arjunamusic.

Amiira - Curious Objects - low-pitched meditative set from the trio of Samuel Rohrer, Klaus Gesing, & Björn Meyer; “Gravity Inn” (track 9) could pass for Jon Hassell

The trio Amiira of Klaus Gesing, Björn Meyer and Samuel Rohrer has returned after a layoff of six years since their debut LP. It would be unwise to expect for them to pick up exactly where they left off, given all the turbulent change that the world has encountered since this time, and indeed the new Album Curious Objects reflects a clear expansion of the players’ abilities. The fundamentals that guided the debut album – spatiality, refined coolness, the non-verbal “narrative” quality - are still very much present, but are this time reinforced with an even more pronounced feeling of communicating across wide physical and conceptual spaces. Altogether, Curious Objects is a potent antidote for spiritual and musical fatigue; especially recommended for those who have already left behind the limitations posed by genres. It is more than the sum of its parts, and its crossing of numerous different boundaries never feels like the goal in and of itself: instead, all this activity feels like a tool for unlocking and decoding even more supposedly irreconcilable qualities and ideas. (Thomas Bey William Bailey)

Samuel Rohrer, Max Loderbauer, Stian Westerhus, Tobias Freund - KAVE - group electronic improvisations, from ambient to slow-burn soul; track 7 (Giant Peach) could almost fit on David Sylvian's Gone To Earth

Samuel Rohrer - Continual Decentering - coming from the same place as Burnt Friedman (both sonically and physically), yet with a distinct sound (Arjunamusic)

Samuel Rohrer - Hungry Ghosts - atmospheric percussion & electronics

With his Arjunamusic label and a growing catalog of category-defying releases, Samuel Rohrer continues to quietly, yet confidently, make a name for himself as a genuinely unique figure within the European electronic music realm. Over the past decade he has assembled a repertoire of music that fills a sadly neglected gap in the modern musical landscape. That is to say, he has made a number of “electronically”-aided works that never seem to make “electronic-ism” the main selling point or raison d'être. Rohrer understands that we inhabit a networked media landscape that no longer sees a novelty value in every synthetic or technological sound, and by realizing this, he makes a music that fully engages with the present without completely disregarding the exciting speculative sensibility that has allowed electronic music to solidify into a tradition. His latest solo album, Hungry Ghosts, again shows the high quality of sonic design that can be achieved by conceptualizing musical passages as living, breathing entities rather than as signposts to some still distant reality.

Maybe more so than any of Rohrer’s solo records to date, Hungry Ghosts is the one that most unambiguously displays the artist as a kind of inspired sound “cultivator” or landscaper rather than just a straightforward “producer”. The emphasis here seems to be biological growth processes rendered in musical form, and in fact some track titles namechecking the biodiversity of the external world (“Slow Fox”, “Ctenophora”) and neurochemistry (“Serotonin”) lend some additional credence to this interpretation.

As with previous outings, Rohrer starts with his skills as a genre-resistant percussionist and builds from there, with dense clusters of drum hits and icy cymbal exclamations leading the way into a wide-open atmosphere full of fragmented phrases, marked with strange reversals or compressions of time. The percussive portions and other ambiences merge together in such a way that the latter seems like a kind of shifting, holographic camouflage for the former; an effect which makes for a greater than usual number of shifts in mood. 

Dark Star Safari - Walk Through Lightly - a surprisingly straightforward (and pretty) set of atmospheric ballads, given the players

Dark Star Safari is a musical entity comprised of Jan Bang, Erik Honoré, Eivind Aarset, Samuel Rohrer and John Derek Bishop. Their second full-length offering Walk Through Lightly is the first to feature all five musicians together in the studio from the outset, making for a more organic refinement upon their already established methodology: gradually sculpting distinct songs out of collective improvisations, or using the raw material from initial recordings as the basis for more carefully articulated compositions. The final mix is one that invites few stylistic comparisons to other musical peers, and in fact few comparisons to existing genres. Though this second offering from the project is frosted over with a Scandinavian sense of spatiality and melancholy, it’s best listened to without considering any origin points, geographic or otherwise: from the opening moments of “Walk Through Lightly,” listeners will feel as if teleported directly into the middle of an enigmatic film-in-progress. 
 
 Given the sense of foreboding, anticipation, and even unease that these kinds of subjects often bring with them, the spare and un-hurried music is all the more intriguing, especially when the eponymous finale arrives and the percolating sound bed seems to hint at a coming resolution, but then leaves the listener with more questions than answers. By competently fusing a mature, economical approach to sincerely romantic lyrical themes, Walk Through Lightly is a rare accomplishment.