The four horsemen of the apocalypse, as described in the Book of Revelation, will come riding, each on a colored horse, white, red, black and pale (green) horses, but the Swedish Gothenburg-based duo Joxfield ProjeX – keyboards player Janne Yan Andersson and guitarist Stefan Oax Ek, insist that their album «Red White Black & Pale» is telling only «something about horses, about their lives and deaths». This avant-whatever duo claims that all their dealings with and about horses were «lost when it turned into multiple colors everywhere».

As all of the dynamic duo releases «Red White Black & Pale» is a DIY work that addresses «nice, open-minded people». And, indeed, Joxfield ProjeX covers many sonic terrains, some are nice, other obnoxious. The first piece «The White Horseman» reaches thick and noisy stratospheric skies, neighboring the prog-psychedelic-celestial plot of the like-minded Acid Mothers Temple, with Ex endless solo guitar, and is grounded only by the mechanical beat of the programmed drums. «Staring at a Pale Face» is introduced with an industrial drone, surprisingly with some lyrical qualities, but soon morphs into a rough wall of atmospheric-noisy sounds matched with a techno beat.

«Death of a Black Horse» goes into cinematic, dark territories with its symphonic synth, electronic sounds, and its distorted guitar wailing, all rooted by an industrial pulse and mutated samples of human voices and an unknown female singer. The last piece «The Red King» rides on another mechanical pulse and navigates, like the first piece, to some far, atmospheric destinations, with spacy synthesizer and electric guitar, until this sonic compound explodes in deep space.

If this was meant to be a soundtrack of a coming apocalypse, we all should think again about our beliefs.

Eyal Hareuveni 

Janne Yan Andersson (keys, drum prog, eff, sampler, elec, synth), Stefan Oax Ek (g, e-bow, eff)