The ferny Brutalist cityscape on the cover of Soli City’s Poetics of a New Estate is a fine advertisement for what’s inside: curated Copenhagen vibelessness, shorn of grit but not without a certain numinous quality. Anyone who’s heard the computer-screen fantasias of ML Buch’s Suntub or the mallsoft jazz of MK Velsorf and Aase Nielsen’s Opening Night knows on some level what to expect: spiffy ’80s guitar that twangs and ripples just this side of Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer,” a conservatory-schooled ear for arrangement, a lack of friction that belies the spookiness rumbling underneath. Less expected are the jarring tonal shifts liable to induce whiplash across its 45 minutes—and which would seem haphazard if every single one of them wasn’t meticulously documented in a bespoke score booklet, printed on premium paper, that costs more than the album itself.
Soli City is the project of Harald Bjørn, a recent graduate of Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory, which stands at the center of the city’s exciting experimental scene (Buch is both a fellow graduate and labelmate). Bjørn’s piano playing is central to the architecture of the record, but you won’t find either his real name or a piano credit in the liners: “Even though it’s difficult, I often try to remove myself and my own perspective from my work,” he told 15 Questions. Instead, he cedes the spotlight to the small chamber ensemble tasked with bringing his compositions to life, plus a cadre of spoken-word performers who literalize the “poetics” in the title. It seems like every electronic album has an ASMR-adjacent spoken-word guest feature these days, but the ones on Poetics of a New Estate are both engaging and purposeful, especially one about a singer struggling with an identity crisis after the loss of her voice.
As “1871 (Arena)” opens, we seem to be in the territory of major-key ambient yearners like Port Blue and Eluvium. Strings reflect shafts of light as searching piano chords hover overhead. But slowly the strings droop and the chords sour, preparing us for the approach Bjørn will take on the album, which is to play around in beauty and then throw the listener off with striking moments of ugliness. The glimmer of real strings contrasts harshly on “Touch Glass” with the dull sound of the cheapest synthesized string presets. At several points, the music breaks free into the kind of goofy breakdown one might associate with EDM or Life of Pablo-era arena rap, but never with any warning or catharsis. “Versailles” flings itself open with a mean freestyle beat, but before it can snowball into a groove, it dissolves into a coda of phone sound effects liable to disorient anyone listening on their mobile device.
Poetics of a New Estate throws a lot at the listener, and it’s easy to conjecture that it’s intended to capture the overload of modern life, all those voices and machines constantly buzzing in one’s ear at all times. But the chamber arrangements on slower pieces like “U & I (Parahelion)” are so immersive that I wonder what might’ve happened if Bjørn had given this album a bit more space to breathe, especially as not all of his collagist impulses behoove him. Pop-culture nods like a Kill Bill siren and a brief interpolation of Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck Babe” are too recognizable to signify anything but themselves. The sampled DJ tags on “Jericho’s Trumpet” reveal little aside from a debt to Elysia Crampton, and a snippet of dialogue punning on the word “danish” scans as little more than a bad joke, especially after the earlier poignancy involving the singer’s lost voice. Poetics of a New Estate is a fine example of the distinctly architectural music coming out of Copenhagen, but there are times I wish Bjørn had taken some lessons from the Brutalists and erred towards reducing clutter instead of cramming the margins with ornamentation.
