The newly-founded label of Swedish experimental double bass player Vilhelm Bromander is called Differ Records and is inspired by Italian Baroque composer-music theorist-violinist Giuseppe Tartini (1692-1770), who discovered the difference tone. Thus tone, also called the Tartini tone, is an acoustic phenomenon – a third note heard when two notes are played steadily and with intensity.
The debut album of this label, «…for some reason that escapes us», the duo of Bromander & Norwegian experimental guitarist Fredrik Rasten seeks to create a similar acoustic phenomena. The entwined bowed instruments pf Bromander Rasten together with their subtle, ethereal voices do blend into a collective body of harmonics, interference and difference tones. Bromander & Rasten crate a series of highly resonant yet very quiet and gentle drones, based on just intonation, but with strong hypnotic and surprisingly tactile presence.
The six pieces were recorded at the countryside studio Flerbruket, Norway in August 2018 by bass player Magnus Skavhaug Nergaard (known from Ich Bin N!ntendo and Monkey Plot). These abstract pieces sound familiar, slowly sketch their own melodic rationale but somehow radiate an untimely sense of music that comes from very ancient sources. These minimalist, cyclical pieces have an accumulated emotional power. Piece like The almost silent «A glimpse through a thousand examples» or the mini-suite «Gentle mountains» open for the listener a new, slowed-down, and fragile dimensions of time and space, until the listener is totally lost within the embracing, bowed sounds. «Harmony for two or more voices II» even adds a lyrical-melancholic touch to the drone.
For some enigmatic reason this is one of the gratifying and addictive listening experience of 2019.
Eyal Hareuveni
Vilhelm Bromander (b, v), Fredrik Rasten (g, v)
