Sol – Sun / Støv – Dust
With their distant, icy ambient music in shades of pale blues and greys, the Norwegian duo Pjusk evoke lonliness, time and landscape with their sound that stretches slowly, carefully and patiently through the air. Having previously released two albums on 12k, their debut Sart(12k1042, 2007) and Sval (12k1059, 2010) and a third, Tele (Glacial Movement Records, 2012), Pjusk return with perhaps their boldest and most focused album yet. Solstøv is an album made almost entirely from the sound of the trumpet (performed by Kåre Nymark jr), both natural and processed. Pjusk explored it not only as the delicate acoustic instrument that it is but as a generator of tone and nuanced source material. 12k’s Taylor Deupree was invited to provide sonic manipulations of the trumpet with the sound design system Kyma transforming it into delicately strange passages and tones.
Solstøv’s instrumental approach allowed the duo to focus and dig incredibly deep into the harmonic world they were creating. Playing off ideas of the macro and the micro, from the universe above to the earth below our feet (so beautifully realized in the cover painting by Marianne Morild)Pjusk was able to firmly command their characteristic glacial sound, yet approach it from an entirely different musical starting point. The duo’s massive soundscapes are punctuated with low, churning rhythms, sparkling and fractured textural fragments all accented and wrapped in harmonic movements of the trumpet and its ghosts.
Solstøv, the sun, the dust… expansive, shifting, weightless and shimmering. This is an album, epic in its sound and approach, that channels the Norwegian landscape in all of its stark beauty; its cold, its warmth, and its place in the universe. To listen to Pjusk is to sit quietly in an endless night.
