Posh Isolation got its start as an outlet for power electronics, industrial, and post-punk; it was born of provocation. But lately the Danish label’s output is just as likely to reflect a softer, gentler sensibility. Take label cofounder Loke Rahbek: For years, his work in the duo Damien Dubrovnik was dedicated to the most caustic, eviscerating strains of noise. Their synths had the reek of burning plastic; extreme distortion disfigured their vocals like blisters on burned skin. But their sound has opened up. Parts of the band’s 2017 album Great Many Arrows recall Tim Hecker’s pastel reveries, while Rahbek’s Croatian Amor project has evolved from what he once termed “bubblegum industrial” into a velvety variant of pop-ambient. Buy Corals Online, a collaboration with the Copenhagen multimedia artist Frederik Valentin, is among the most unreservedly lyrical and elegiac music to come from Rahbek yet: a set of wistful sketches for synthesizer and piano that sway as gracefully as kelp beds in a turquoise sea.
Valentin, like Rahbek, seems to have mellowed over the years. Recently he’s been involved with the Posh Isolation project Kyo, a duo with Lust for Youth’s Hannes Norrvide; their most recent album, 2017’s I Musik, is an uneasy swirl of synths and found sounds that’s as elegant as a still life. But Valentin’s past is spottier. In the 2000s, he played with grunge-inspired dirtbags Hard Rock Power Spray, whose repertoire included songs like “Ride on Me,” “We Belong in Bed,” and “Much More Music for You to Be Fucking on Drugs To”; then came the more polished Vomit Supreme and the druggy space-rock project Complicated Universal Cum. If you think that name is tasteless, wait ‘til you get a load of his video for “Everything Is Drugs Pt. One,” which turns out to be not the only time he thought that wearing a swastika was a good idea; to follow Valentin’s artistic evolution is to slip uncomfortably down a rabbit hole of druggy, post-ironic nihilism.
Buy Corals Online, on the other hand, is a thing of striking, immediate beauty. Across eight tracks and 32 minutes, it explores plangent synthesizer pads and sentimental piano interwoven with lean arpeggios and thickets of Reichian minimalism. “Garden Tattoo,” the album’s shortest track, is a pulsing steel-drum fugue, while “A Woman Without” touches upon Debussy and Sonic Youth’s “Providence” before dissolving into harmonica-soaked ambient blues.
The mood is foggily absent-minded, like a lover lost in thought. “You Come With” opens with quiet, meandering organ notes; after a couple of minutes, a pulsing arpeggio lends a sense of direction before muted sheets of noise rise up from the mix and all the song’s layers seem to bunch up, like fabric tangled in a sewing machine. In “A Million Coloured Fish,” keyboard clusters shiver in place, as though huddling together for warmth; a strange clattering noise might be someone walking around a hardwood-floored apartment, banging into the furniture. Balanced between song and ambient sketch, the album proposes an unusual hybrid, one that feels as though it could pull apart at any moment: composed enough not to seem too haphazard, yet abstract enough to tip into full sentimentalism.
Buy Corals Online is supposedly inspired by “the floating world,” a decadent aesthetic from Japan’s Edo period, though the press release’s Wikipedia-cribbed description might suggest that the theme doesn’t run much deeper than the music’s aquatic qualities. More telling might be that title. It’s the kind of phrase you might come across in a piece of email spam or a block of internet chum. Its flat, quotidian ring masks levels of unease (not the least of which is an uncomfortable reminder that the world’s reefs are dying); it offers a tantalizing glimpse of the ocean, only to land face-first right back in the distancing and deadening properties of the internet. You come seeking seaside solitude, but you wind up staring at a screen. As with everything the Posh Isolation crew does, even their melancholy is complicated.
