Supersilent's music exists beyond any normal human activity, any comprehensible emotion. It's hard to imagine partying, housecleaning, or commuting with it, as its screeches, melted horn riffs, and creep-show keyboards bombard the edge of reason. Its rhythms hint at continuity and then peel off in whatever direction, perversely arbitrary, shunting the flow. Imagine straining to hear a rustling through the keyhole of a door that might burst open to unleash a terrible racket at any moment—that's 13. When you listen to it, you can't really do anything but listen to it. That's an advantage if you consider it as a sign of vividness, but perhaps a limitation if you think about how often you sit by yourself and do nothing but listen intently to music.
The precise numbering of Supersilent's recordings almost humorously belies their spontaneous nature—every album is improvised. On 13, the trio moves from Rune Grammofon to Oslo's other leading electronic jazz label, Smalltown Supersound, but the sequence and the style are unbroken. The group's distant roots are in free jazz, which they still stitch into abstract patchworks of ambient music and arrhythmic noise. Roughly, Arve Henriksen coaxes strange tones from trumpets and woodwinds; Ståle Storløkken pounds vintage keyboards; and Helge Sten, who also makes dark ambient music as Deathprod, at once encases and engages the improvisations with rich electro-acoustic atmospheres. 13 was performed over a PA system in a shared space, and it benefits from a sense of presence even at its most daunting.
Though Supersilent has gone without a drummer since 2009, they remain a highly percussive outfit because of the pops and crackles of the electronics and the extended techniques used by the players. 13's opening track is described as "Indonesian ritual music heard from a Scandinavian mountaintop," but you couldn't be blamed for imagining a rhythm section falling down the stairs into a basement full of broken computers instead. "13.1" lands on just the right side of the line between exploring and getting lost. Not every track does. These improvisers are good enough to bend something as unruly as "13.3" into an arc, but it's still a gruelingly disjunctive go at it. And on the bumptious "13.5," we remember, as we wholly forget during the most captivating passages, that this is essentially just some dudes getting together and jamming.
Luckily, "13.5" is followed by one those velvety, far-off, lyrical trumpet solos familiar from Henriksen's wonderful solo albums, and there are other songs like it here—smaller, shorter, and more subtle. Not a one is unwelcome. Aptly for such extreme music, 13 is most potent when Supersilent either goes inward, as on "13.6," or goes all out, staying well clear of the noncommittal region in between. "13.7" might take this dictum a tad far; a screaming fireball that takes six minutes to strike spends six more wreaking almost unlistenable havoc. "13.9" is just as big and twice as perfect, rewarding anyone who's made it to the end with a cool-toned, hard-won, and not at all unnecessary refresher course on what music is and why people like it. That's the fascination and the frustration of Supersilent: it's like they keep destroying the lineaments of form just for the pleasure of vouchsafing them to us again.
