Moljebka Pvlse - Komuku

Album: Komoku

Artist:  Moljebka Pvlse

Label: Cyclic Law

Catalogue  no: 118^th Cycle

Tracklist:

        1.      A Repetition Without Origin

        2.      An Emptiness of Language

        3.      The Functioning of Remembering

        4.      And the Farewell to All that One has Lost

Moljebka Pvlse is a long-established experimental outfit from Sweden, known for utilising both electronic and acoustic instruments in combination with field recordings and found sounds. It’s a palette of strong textures and colours, that when mixed together produces a dish of dark majesty.

If Circular’s Ghostwhite album (see my review of that release here) treads a middle path to give us a balanced overview, then this exegesis falls heavily on the side of darkness and the infinitely incomprehensible forces at the heart of roiling creation (with a small ‘c’). Here are the minutes and seconds before the catastrophic moment that triggers the supernova, or the dense timeless interval between stasis and sudden inexorable collapse to a singularity. It’s also the slow millennia of matter coalescing into discrete systems: planets and moons orbiting suns. Equally it’s a story of the immeasurable spaces between stars, planets, and galaxies, seemingly empty yet still filled with the diffuse and infinitesimally small components of star- and galaxy-stuff.

Here are prodigious sweeps and swathes of bass and mid-range rumbles, the granulated aftermath of long-dead stars, and stretched out gong- and bell-like tones, along with abstract noises, raspings, hootings, and processed voices – in fact anything and everything that could be commandeered to depict the viscerally immense stretches of time and mechanisms necessary to both creation and dissolution, has been. If one can extend a metaphor to its logical conclusion, within the span of this album we see and feel the birth, expansion, life, contraction, and death of the universe. The experience is at once exhilarating and terrifying.

This is darkly magnificent, sumptuous, sublime, and chilling. On a personal level, this is another essential dark ambient album of the year.

Psymon Marshall 2019