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Review: 'WALLUMRØD, CHRISTIAN'
'Pianokammer'   

-  Label: 'Hubro'
-  Genre: 'Ambient' -  Release Date: '9th February 2015'-  Catalogue No: 'HUBROCD2542'

Our Rating:
Fahrkunst is German word for 'man engine' , the mechanised ladders used to carry miners up and down shafts.

I have no idea why the opening track of this album is called this but there is something machine like about it. It has no melody but consists of insistent, and strangely soothing, waves of industrial drone. It has some similarities to the ghostly tones on the soundtrack to David Lynch's Eraserhead.

The piece lasts seven and half minutes and prepares the listener for an album's worth of abstract ambience until, that is, the second track begins.

Hoksang is another kettle of fish entirely. More jazz than ambient; it , and another track called Boyd 1970, are more akin to Keith Jarrett style miniatures.

With Second Fahrkunst the drone returns, this time punctuated by random piano notes as if a cat were walking along the keyboard. Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice might have said.

So who exactly is this Christian Wallumrød?

Hubro's press release says he is a prominent Norwegian composer who was born in 1971. He comes from a jazz and church music background. The label also warns us that "any attempt to categorise his music is doomed to fail".

This is his first solo album and it was recorded in different locations on different grand pianos, a fact that helps explain the restless, fractured mood.   

The final two tracks follow the earlier pattern of forms versus formlessness.

School Of Ecofisk disintegrates into splintered piano notes as if Wallumrød is trying to imitate the sound of raindrops.

Lassome, the longest track at almost nine minutes, commences with subtle variations of a rhythmic loop before fading into similar spectral drones to those the record began with.

These shifts between cohesion and abstraction will infuriate many but for those who are tolerant of waywardness, this is a fascinating album that demands and rewards serious attention.
  author: Martin Raybould

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WALLUMRØD, CHRISTIAN - Pianokammer