You might not recognize Peder Mannerfelt by name, but over the past decade, the Swedish electronic musician has had a hand in plenty of projects with a higher profile than his own. He and his frequent collaborator Henrik von Sivers co-produced much of Fever Ray's debut album; they also produced Blonde Redhead's Penny Sparkle and some of Glasser's debut. Mannerfelt used to make stark, charcoal-dusted techno as the Subliminal Kid, and with another Swedish producer, Malcolm Pardon, he peddles burbling cosmic synth jams in the duo Roll the Dice. But the key to understanding his work under his own name lies in "Evening Redness in the West," a strange and harrowing song from his 2014 debut album that borrows its title from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Over flickering drones, a computerized voice intones a succession of disconnected words that might be ripped straight from McCarthy's pages: "barren," "horizon," "filth," "Bowie knife," "blood." It sounds a little bit like HAL, the on-board computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, having a fatal meltdown in the dry Texas chaparral—an unlikely juxtaposition that goes to the heart of Mannerfelt's vivid, unconventional approach. He's no goth, exactly, but his work is deeply informed by gothic literary tropes, and in his hands, electronic music's habitual futurism looks a lot more like horror.
Mannerfelt's last album, 2015's The Swedish Congo Record, used coldwave and techno as a roundabout way of examining African percussion and European colonialism. Although the themes underlying his new record, Controlling Body, are less explicit, we can get a sense for what's on his mind from titles like "Abysmal," "The Confidence of Ignorance," and "Limits to Growth." This is chilly, forbidding stuff, setting disassembled techno rhythms against a backdrop of queasy synths and industrial clang. The ambiguity of the album title bleeds into a series of questions. What constitutes a body, for instance? What do our bodies control, and what forces control us? Is it possible that the computers are really in charge?
Controlling Body opens with "Building of the Mountain," in which Glasser's Cameron Mesirow, whose voice is threaded throughout the album—sometimes speaking, sometimes singing, and often just providing throaty color—sings long, clear tones that quiver against filament-bright sine waves. There's no rhythm to speak of, just a gloomy "Mentasm" stab that comes hurtling across the stereo field at regular intervals. The overall impression is of Joan La Barbara leading a funeral march across the outskirts of a Belgian rave, and that bleak tone persists across the rest of the album. A few tracks are ominously atmospheric: "Coast to Coast" suggests sighing train whistles, and "Abysmal," an ambient acid sketch, enlists a chorus of the damned to drive its apocalyptic point home. Those quieter cuts help cushion full-bore tracks like "Limits to Growth" and "Perspectives," in which the word "subject" stutters and loops over punishing, shuddering rhythms. It's as through the Singularity had finally arrived, but due to insufficient bandwidth, all those uploading souls were left endlessly buffering, stuck in a kind of data purgatory.
Given linguistic cues like these, it's not hard to find all manner of possible interpretations for the ideas that give Controlling Body its substance; it's about as literary as instrumental electronic music gets. But Mannerfelt also keeps things wonderfully open-ended: The patient, glassy pings of "The Confidence of Ignorance" climax in a slow, rhythmic fusillade of gunshots and distant shouts, and if the source is what I think it is, that almost certainly makes this the finest album this year that samples skeet shooting. And on the closing "I Love You," Glasser sings a scratchy ballad that's as foreboding as it is tender. Her presence—hushed, vulnerable, but also defiant and at times intimidating—helps emphasize the imposing scale of Mannerfelt's sweeping electronic architectures. Both breathy and carnal, she is the ghost in the machine and the body in the cloud, a specter haunting a dystopian landscape of electrical hum and binary code, the human point of reference that brings his gothic panorama thrillingly to life.
