Dura / Former Selves – Split
We all know I could gush about narcotic ambient cassettes until the cows come home, but this split tape from two musical heroes of mine demanded more serious attention. To be blunt, this release is proof enough that international cassette culture remains an incubator of peerless musical creativity across continents. Paul Skomsvold and Mattson Ogg are both veritable ambient superstars by now; they could easily fill stadiums, but their sound is better suited to fill up a small room, maybe a warehouse, or perhaps ideally just the infinite expanse between your basilar membrane and consciousness. It seems inevitable that these two artists, perennial favorites at Galician bliss-music blog Microphones In The Trees, would fulfill their destinies with a split tape on Kevin Greenspon’s Bridgetown. When Dura initially emailed me about the tape, I almost ignored him due to overwhelming déjà vu—surely this tape already existed?
Skomsvold, a California resident who broke all our hearts by moving to Spain last year, continues to crank out masterful synth-based dreamscapes as Former Selves, delivering increasingly mature and challenging work on labels such as Wounded Knife and SicSic. On the latter imprint, Skomsvold collaborated with German modular maestro Guenter Schlienz to produce the breathtakingly beautiful Blaue Stunde tape. The structures and moods of Skomsvold’s compositions now defy easy categorization, with simple new-age melodies melting into ambiguous, unpredictable drones. A mysterious, nightmarish cavalcade of haunting motifs, the rich harmonic dissonance eschews easy labeling as “new age,” while the diversity of textures resists an easy comparison to previous decades. I think it’s safe to say we will look back on 2015 as the year Former Selves became timeless.
And what of Dura? Conversely, I wouldn’t argue Mattson Ogg exhibits any notable maturation of his sound—but why would he need to? Dura’s layered guitar loops are already gentleness and restraint par excellence, each plucked phrase fractalizing into a soft undercurrent of hypnotic drone. Rather than seeing a progression towards more expressive and ambitious music, this side explores a dense synthesis between perfection and happy accidents, as microtonal imperfections complement the glacial harmonies hovering across the narrative, and vice versa. By now the cows have long since returned to the barn and dozed off into bovine dreamworlds, and here I am, still gushing over this tape. Need I say more? When this landmark achievement reaches your ears, you’ll be hooked.
Copies of the split cassette are available now from Bridgetown’s site.
