Tor Lundvall - Empty City
There's a progression of events that lead to Tor Lundvall's Empty City. First, we build cities and railways and roads and factories; then, we vanish from them, disappearing into the night. Lundvall, riding the train through these empty landscapes, is struck by their ephemeral nature -- the way they are built and seemingly abandoned. He carries home these images and paints landscapes. These landscapes, rich with lambent skies and intense palettes of grey and charcoal, became the inspiration for the ghostly ambience of Empty City.
There's enough metropolitan drift floating through this record that a comparison to Mark Nelson's work as Pan*American is a starting landmark. But, I think Lundvall's paintings are a filter on the spectral nature of the abandoned -- sorry, "empty"; this distinction is, I think, key to Lundvall's interpretation -- cityscapes. While the music is imbued with phantasmal swirls of melody and the sepulchral echo of mechanical percussion, there is an indelible fingerprint of color and heat still captive within these ghostly sounds. Voices -- acting as instruments sans language -- exhale with moist humanity behind them. "Night Work" reverberates with the steel pulse of a train yard while vents of warm steam jet up into a slate sky. There is work being done beneath the ground, human work.
"Early Hours" ticks with the metronomic pulse of street sweepers smoothing the grit from the gutters, the long tone hush that descends upon the still city and the echoing chord of rarefied sound that seems like the echo of a party that got out an hour ago and is still quietly draining away. It is the sound of that attenuated exhaustion which rides home with the nightlife, whispering that fading echo of the final flush of last call, last kiss, in your ears. A repetitive drip of rainwater provides the rhythm for "Buildings and Rain" while anguished melodies twist into awkward spirals in the puddles running beneath the eaves. Sounds like ravens expiring are stretched across rain-damp skies. "Wires" vibrates with electrical urgency, a organ hymn raised from power lines and transformer stations; while "Empty City" approaches the closet thing to a trip-hop tune, as a torch singer who has lost her words but not her voice lets her lamentation drift across the empty boulevards and still avenues.
Tragically short, Empty City is like a town glimpsed through a break in the mist. Populated by ghosts and rife with echoes, you barely get a chance to hear the whispered litany of the city's hidden inhabitants before the song vanishes. Rhythms you think you understand decay into nothingness just as they worm their way into your brain and melodies are simply phantoms of the daylight hours when the sun stirs up the wind and the voices. It is the closest we city-dwellers get to silence; it is the purest and most uncluttered music we can hear. Lundvall captures this rich tapestry of evocative ambience beautifully with Empty City.
Tor Lundvall
Strange Fortune [2006]
music
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