PRESS TEXT

Finding ourselves in all things features two lengthy tracks, standing in stark contrast to each other: Melting with butterflies is brimming with life: Chaotic, hysterical and joyous - celebrating the viewpoint of all small things and their seemingly frantic nature. The way mountains make love is equally intense, but with a quite different energy – a slow moving organic unity vibrating with the frequencies of everything big and ancient.

Both tracks explore and elaborate on its respective idea. Sonic layers unfold and overlap in long arches. The recording is representative for the duo’s way of thinking about form and musical storytelling through an extended use of their instruments’ possibilities. The vertical is always present in the horizontal and vice versa.

TRACK LIST
1. Melting with butterflies
2. The way mountains make love

PERSONNEL
Katariin Raske - torupill
Christian Meaas Svendsen - bass

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REVIEWS

Wire Magazine

Svendsen is a Norwegian bassist and colleague of Paal Nilssen-Love, who leads his own band Nakama, and a label of the same name. Raska plays torupill or Estonian bagpipe. They’ve been making folkish and primal duo music since 2012. Their debut album features two contrasting tracks, totalling 33 minutes. “Melting With Butterflies” is a blistering, high-pitched aural assault; “The Way Mountains Mak Lov”, with arco bass, begins deep, visceral and forbidding, but shifts into higher registers, revealing uninterrupted, grating bagpipe sonorities. An insight into the future of folk musix – and it’s not pretty

Chain DLK

The debut album as a duo from these two performers, each with established CV’s of band work, is underpinned fundamentally by contrasts. There are two works, one frantic and relentless, the other sombre and slow. There’s a sonic pull between the high squeaking of Raska’s Estonian bagpipe and the low growls of Svendsen’s double bass. But this is clearly two performers in sync with one another, which is what makes it work.

“Melting With Butterflies” is fourteen minutes of pushing two instruments to their limits. The folky tones of the bagpipe are bent and abused so that they begin to sound variously like sirens, like animals or (less flatteringly) like balloons, while the intimately-recorded double bass is not just bowed but also scratched and tweaked. At times it feels like the duo are in a race to see who can either perform fastest, or break their instrument first. It’s not a piece of music you could drop casually into, but fourteen minutes of it is long enough for it to establish its own baseline of what’s sonically normal and let you adjust to it- just in time for it to abruptly stop.

Second piece “The Way Mountains Make Love” is consciously opposite. Long, low single bowed notes and drones are the order of the day, layered up in a conspicuously flat or gently undulating way that feels less like dramatic mountain tops and more like the never-ending tectonic pressure deep underground. As it progresses over 19 minutes, there’s a degree to which it gets more melodic, more vocal-like, and gently lighter, as though harmony is gradually being found amongst the grit. It’s romance, but on geological time.

It’s a strong and deeply confident pair of expressions from a pair of talented performers playing around with ideas that are deceptively simple, but executed with precision and purpose that really shines through- and the result is eye-opening.