<\/p>\n
His own palette of sounds Techno meets baroque in cult Norwegian guitarist Stephan Meidell\u2019s second Hubro solo album, an immersive sonic journey incorporating electronic beats, treated tape and synthesiser with a re-edited live ensemble including Hardanger fiddle, baroque violin, prepared piano, harpsichord and clarinet.\u2028\u00a0What Meidell has achieved here is extraordinary, signalling the arrival of a major European voice in a musical area that as yet has no real name. Indeed, you can argue that \u2018Metrics\u2019 presents a new form of electro-acoustic art somewhere between sound and music, and between improvisation and composition, that defies all the usual categories, whether post-jazz, post-rock or post-anything. And while Meidell \u2013 who\u2019s 34 and on this album has worked between Bergen and Berlin \u2013 is, among other things, a guitarist by trade, this doesn\u2019t sound like a guitarist\u2019s album, although there are lots of strings on it. Importantly (and in sharp contrast to his solo debut, \u2018Cascades\u2019, also on Hubro), \u2018Metrics\u2019 is very much the product of an ensemble, with Meidell picking specific players, helping to guide their improvisations and then editing and shaping the results.\u2028\u00a0\u2028The result, \u2018Metrics\u2019, is a wholly engaging suite of compositions\/improvisations in sound and music that\u2019s quite unlike anything else out there, and as close to an audio-art installation as it is to a conventional album.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Techno meets baroque in cult Norwegian guitarist Stephan Meidell\u2019s second Hubro solo album, an immersive sonic journey incorporating electronic beats, treated tape and synthesiser with a re-edited live ensemble including Hardanger fiddle, baroque violin, prepared piano, harpsichord and clarinet.\u2028\u00a0\u2028Although the phrase has become almost meaningless through TV talent-show discourse, it\u2019s tempting to describe the experience of listening to Stephan Meidell\u2019s \u2018Metrics\u2019 as \u201ca journey\u201d. While there\u2019s no obvious narrative connecting the seven separate pieces that go to make up the album, its restless rhythmic patterning of sound on sound keeps you constantly on the move, travelling from one imagined place or interior space to another, from track to track and beginning to end. \u2018Metrics\u2019 also works on several levels simultaneously, so that its secrets are released incrementally, over time. If ever an album demanded to be listened to while lying on the floor in the dark, this is it.<\/p>\n
The contributions of the various personnel, most of whom have a connection with Meidell through other groups and projects, are vital. By bringing together different musical registers, both through the instruments employed (some of which have very specific cultural associations \u2013 like the Hardanger fiddle of Erlend Apneseth, or the harpsichord, or the prepared piano, or the digital sampler), and also through the types of music involved, from techno\/electronica to the classical baroque, and from musique concrete to prog-rock to contemporary audio-art, Meidell effectively creates his own palette of sounds, and his own original contexts in which to use them. As a consequence, form and content seem to neatly align, the one echoing the other.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s also a very winning sense of playfulness to Meidell\u2019s methods, which works against the over-earnest, goatee-stroking, caricature of seriousness sometimes associated with experimental music-makers and listeners. Here, electronic beats might owe their provenance to the manipulation of a mixer without any input, as if some ghost DJ were communicating through the ether, while one\u2019s concentration is continually being refocused by surprising or jarring juxtapositions, as when the drip of what might be synthesised raindrops is heard against what could either be the distressed strings of a baroque violin, or a chair leg being scraped along the floor. As with so much of \u2018Metrics\u2019, it\u2019s difficult to tell what\u2019s there and what\u2019s not, or how to separate the audio-real from the audio-hallucination.<\/p>\n
As \u2018Metrics\u2019 did not arrive, as it were, fully formed, it\u2019s useful to check its immediate antecedents in Meidell\u2019s already crowded catalogue of recordings. Last year the debut album of Erlend Apneseth trio, where Stephan\u00b4s guitars and electronics play a key role got rave reviews. His previous solo set, \u2018Cascades\u2019 (2014), really was a guitarist\u2019s album, with its origins in long, site-specific improvisations in the reverberant spaces of decommissioned factory buildings and silos in Bergen, Norway. The three albums he has made with the trio Cakewalk (2012-17) also contribute to our understanding of \u2018Metrics\u2019 through their irreverent approach to the manipulation of sound, crash-editing wildly different genres into new mutant forms. The other key text to consider is probably \u2018Hyphen\u2019 (2016) by Strings & Timpani, his duo with the drummer \u00d8yvind Hegg-Lunde. Here, a concern with creating catchy rhythmic \u2018cells\u2019 through careful layering and repetition anticipates the fascination with rhythm \u2013 and its arhythmic or atonal opposites \u2013 we find in \u2018Metrics\u2019.\u2028\u00a0\u2028But whatever the lineage, whatever the influences, \u2018Metrics\u2019 signals a new departure, and a new intensity of approach. It also marks Stephan Meidell as someone to watch very closely from now on. He\u2019s on a journey. Forced by the need to play quietly while staying in a thin-walled apartment in Berlin, Stephan Meidell plugged into his computer, put on his headphones and began to compose. \u201cMaybe because of the plucked-violin sound of my acoustic guitar, or because of the tonalities and tuning I worked with, the word \u201cbaroque\u201d started floating to the surface, giving me the idea of involving instruments from that era.\u201d\u2028\u00a0\u2028The result, \u2018Metrics\u2019, is a wholly engaging suite of compositions\/improvisations in sound and music that\u2019s quite unlike anything else out there, and as close to an audio-art installation as it is to a conventional album.<\/p>\n
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