Albums
Kok EP - EP
2013
Release Date: 2013
By Brian Howe
Reviewed December 10, 2013
Norwegian house producer Bjørn Torske builds enveloping shapes from the merest scraps of musical information and in recent years has been making loose disco edits of his own instrumental recordings. His new Kok EP feels like a concise alternate version of 2010's excellent Kokning mixed with headphones in mind.
Hardly anyone starts out as a minimalist—at least, not a good one. Whether working in music, painting, or poetry, perhaps you can only effectively leave out as much as you've previously put in. Norwegian house music producer Bjørn Torske has been at it since the late 1990s, and it shows in his advanced level of idiosyncratic understatement. He builds enveloping, vividly fluttering shapes from the merest scraps of musical information—a plucked string, a smear of organ, a dollop of bass—which are deeply syncopated around contoured absences, where the more overt gestures of house music should be. Torske's constructions sound at once impossible and effortless, as if lightly carried along by their own oddball physics, and he treats 4/4 time like a curio cabinet that hides infinite compartments of different shapes and sizes.