love comes shining over the mountains

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Packaged in the usual fine inscrutable minimalist package that you can't really pick up because the moire on the sleeve sucks your fingerprints into it, this starts out with the interstellar Kosmische peng of the universe of traffic and syncopation with Information's 'Confusion Reigns #1'. It's as if various woodland noises have been ground through the mill and have come out in unrecognisable yet intriguing ways. Phonopani's piece floats along, a melody beneath snows and soft burbling. Düplo's water drips across a keyboard, first in drabs and then a full stream, wending their way through static and back again, shivering from speaker to speaker. The sounds drift languidly past, strangely familiar - dandelion seeds blown into the face of an oncoming winter. A Threatened Logical Unit issues sounds like moles in holes, and the attendant rhythmic pounding on their heads pops up more rhythms, with vague voices scattered through the ether and a paranoid driving style through a dangerous downtown...

Arne Nordheim = blooping tones, a child's garden of musical verse, and then a vast resonant cathedral of sound. Monolight's melody mellows, stumbles and whines; cheepy bird tones and lowing wahs encircling it all and lifting it heavenward. Deathprod summons the wind and the two-tone gorgeous tune in a slight tornado of emotion. Plirk's test tones coalesce into a slow cadence to someplace unknown and unprepared-for, slowing down like a full realisation of what's behind the door... Supersilent's multiple oscillations bring subtlety and unforeseen shadows from the corners of the room, layering percussion tracks and pops over each other until there is something resembling a repeated phrase. Alog brings a sprightly theme for their 'Theme from Peeing Toad', all understated drums and watery tones, flowing gradually into the introspective tune that follows. Furuholmen / Bjerkstrand's piece comes and goes, a drowned ghost displaced by the measured clatter of Marhaug / Rishaug. The clatter stutters and shatters, working and sweating out of the right speaker while a buzzing molests speaker left, onto its occasionally chiming demise. Biosphere and Deathprod round out the collection of Norwegian sonic snow with what sounds like backward bells and windchimes set to underload, moving back toward the mountains, unclear if it's ever to return...