In today's world of sonic crowding and sound-byte overload, the fact that this kind of music even exists is a wonder and a delight. It's kind of like discovering a fragile flower in a remote desolate landscape or watching a delicate snow crystal alighting on a grungy winter street. Torstein Lavik, trumpet, Adrian Fiskum Myhr, double bass, Fredrik Rasten, acoustic guitar, and Jan Martin Gismervik, drums, percussion, manage the feat with minimalistic means but with heroic results.
From the sparely articulated and slowly evolving "Filament" the band plies its electro-acoustic magic. The instrumentation, while rather trite and hackneyed on paper, results in a wonder of symphonic, textural and compositional collective thinking. "Filament" spins from long bowed lines on the bass, spry light choral flourishes from the guitar, mysterious and intriguing percussive sounds from scarped cymbals, rustling snares, sizzling metallic tid-bits, and ringing tones of great variety from the trumpet. Economy of means is the guiding light here.
"Lichens" is a pointillistic theme that evolves as sounds are generated in a seemingly ad lib fashion, a kind of tone poem where sounds fall like drops of water on rocks and splotchy twinkling of guitar pizzicato in the altissimo register, along with the snare drum brushes and other sundry percussive; just some of the varied means the band uses to stoke the imagination.
The last two pieces, "Learning to Float" and "Formation of Staring," continue in the established aesthetic, percolating with imaginative sympathetic ideas from all four musicians who weave a wonderful tapestry of colors from their instruments in a manner that shows great imagination, creativity, attentive listening, compositional symmetry and synchronicity.
Susurrus means "a whispering sound," a well-chosen title. Oker, by the same token is also an apt band name, as it implies "increase," (along with the more obvious color reference to "ochre"), something that is evident as four minimalistic voices blend in the whispering and create something soothing and profound.
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