At this late hour, when the clichés of music software have been completely internalized and we're satisfied with marginally fresh reconfigurations of the past, it's an accomplishment to make a record and have your audience wonder exactly what's happening and how it was put together. Norwegians Dag-Are Haugan and Espen Sommer Eide, who record together as Alog, create abstract but accessible instrumental music that neatly stitches sounds birthed inside a computer with live instruments and field recordings. Alog doesn't sound like a band, exactly, but it also feels some ways removed from the bedroom laptop. They seem to be thriving on the spaces that exist between.
On 2001's Duck Rabbit, Alog folded in more beats and experimented with the repetition of techno, but on Miniatures-- their third record on Rune Grammofon-- the duo back once again explores the emotional implications of pure sound. We hear guitars, cut-up synths, indeterminate drones, drum machines, and voices probably captured in a marketplace in their native Tromsø (home of Biosphere, Röyksopp, etc.), but the tracks resist dissection, existing instead as complex interdependent fabric. Opener "Severe Punishment and Lasting Bliss", which also led off Runeology 2, one of Rune Grammofon's label compilations, now stands in my mind as a stone drone classic. The structure of the track is highly dramatic; it slowly morphs from tinny guitar distortion into the towering wall of sound of Fennesz' dreams before finishing in a lengthy swirl of dissonant strings. Highly original and utterly transfixing from the first listen, "Severe Punishment and Lasting Bliss" is a bold statement of intent that the rest of Miniatures lives up to.
Quieter tracks such as "Steady Jogging of the Heart" draw power from small details, judiciously applying the techniques of laptop glitch to a carefully assembled library of sounds. The timbre of the organ chords of "Steady Jogging of the Heart" conveys easy warmth, while the unsteady pulse imparted by choppy editing suggest an undercurrent of anxiety. "Leyden Jar" digs inside the dirty cracks of music production to find the buried noises, smearing beeps, clicks and percussive scrapes between the speakers in an unpredictable pattern. When more conventional instrumentation is pushed to the fore, we get tracks like "St. Paul Sessions II", which combines the machine-steady pulse of a single acoustic guitar chord with clouds of vibraphone. Here Alog take the best ideas of Tortoise-style post-rock, strip away the layer of cerebral remove and the focus on instrumental virtuosity, and let the music drift in more emotional (even sentimental) direction. Which seems precisely what's needed.
It's exciting to know that the same duo created both "St. Paul Sessions II" and "The Youth of Mysterious Conversations", which sounds like a highly abstracted cover of Derrick May's "To Be or Not to Be". Each Alog track is its own small world with its own internal logic, and Miniatures collects nine good ones without a single dud. An excellent record.
