Deaf Center is the Norwegian experimental ambient duo of pianist Otto A Totland and Berlin-based Erik K Skodvin, two old school friends who have been working together since 2002 and running the Miasmah label. Reverie is the seventh full-length album of Deaf Center, released six years after Low Distance (Sonic Pieces, 2019).
Reverie features two extended, free-improvised, hypnotic pieces – «Rev» and «Erie», recorded live in an intimate setting, at Rabih Beaini’s studio, Morphine Raum, in Berlin in October 2024 during the 15th anniversary celebration of the Sonic Pieces label (run by Skodvin’s partner Monique Recknage). Totland plays the piano and Skodvin plays electric guitar, cello, electronics, and processing.
The first piece, «Rev», floats and expands gently throughout the studio space with Totaland’s light, minimalist piano playing embraced, and reverberates with Skodvin’s layered and effects-laden, abstract guitar and cello playing, slowly gravitating into a captivating drone. «Erie» has an elusive cinematic quality, evoking a dark, melancholic atmosphere through atmospheric layers and loops of processed sounds. And light versus dark, or quiet versus loud, has always been at the core of Deaf Center’s meditative and disarming aesthetics, always offering a time-blurring sonic haven that does not seek cathartic, emotional climaxes.
Eyal Hareuveni
Otto A. Totland (piano), Erik K. Skodvin (guitar, cello, electronics, processing)
