When De Stijl first released Jakob Olausson's debut, Moonlight Farm, on vinyl in 2006, it sent a serious ripple of astonishment throughout the folk underground. Olausson, a sugar beet farmer from Landskrona, Sweden, appeared to be particularly well situated to craft the sort of insular, deeply personalized outsider statement that has proven increasingly elusive in recent years. And true to its promise, Moonlight Farm beautifully evokes the best of the acid-folk private press, yet still manages to set itself apart with the deceptive elegance of its design. Now issued on CD for the first time, the album has lost nothing of its disquieting allure, as Olausson's deliberate, unhurried performances and gnomic songs serve to ensnare the listener again and again.
On repeated listens, of course, it becomes clear that the music on Moonlight Farm is considerably less hermetic than it might initially appear. Though the album owes little to any easily tagged folk traditions, there are hints that Olausson has a comfortable working knowledge of his international loner-folk ancestry. With its hazy, swirling atmospherics and dim fidelity, Moonlight Farm at once conjures the afterimages of such self-documenting pioneers as Jandek or Skip Spence, as well as the work of 4-track luminaries ranging from Scotland's Richard Youngs to New Zealand's Graeme Jefferies. Though Olausson's homespun arrangements are filled with surprising touches-- a flourish of sitar, a momentary burst of flute-- they're all treated with such an organic, understated character that it often takes several listens for their presence to even register.
Unlike such troubled figures as Spence, however, Olausson here sounds clear-eyed and direct beneath his surface mysticism, cautioning "Don't hide your head in the sand/ for God's sake, don't run away to Neverland" at one point on "Silhouette V". Yet thanks largely to his decision to double-track all his vocals, even relatively straightforward tracks like "Welcome Traveler" are delivered with a disorienting wobble, while the bent notes of the brief instrumental "The Wind Combs Her Hair" can sound almost South Asian in origin, as though they've strayed from some as yet uncompiled Sublime Frequencies collection.
On such pieces as "Napalm Sky" or "Live to Tell", Olausson shows an admirable willingness to lapse into atonality and dissonance, but without ever fully abandoning the song's essential melodic aims. In contrast, tracks like the irresistible, violin-traced opener "What Will Tomorrow Bring" or the intimate "Listen Sister" are wholly hummable, and the electric guitar lead on "At the Citadel" sounds like it could soon to carry him into a far more conventional, rock-centric climate.
As is often the case with such hushed bedroom broadcasts, Moonlight Farm leaves the listener with the tantalizing question of what might happen if Olausson were to ever find his way into a proper studio, ready to attack his song-based material with an adventurous group of musicians behind him. For the moment, he seems perfectly willing to let us wonder. His more recent projects have found him moving outward in several directions simultaneously, exploring homespun free jazz in his duo Sus & Jakob and heavier space rock with his group Renegade Scanners. The wayfaring nature of these outside projects only serves to reinforce the idea of Moonlight Farm as an especially happy accident, the brilliant labor of an enlightened mind captured at precisely the right place and in the right time.
