This inaugural batch from new Copenhagen label Kaos og Stjernen, which also includes tapes by Dagsrejse and an anonymous artist, illustrates the simple truth that ambient music only works when it is genuine. That quality doesn’t necessarily require an analog approach, but (at least for me) it almost always does. Though J. Folke does make use of “obscure audio-looping softwares” to lightly manipulate some of their source material, Mare is a decidedly warm and muffled affair, the kind that can only come from spool and spindle. Following close on the heels of the project’s debut release Pale Bower, Speaking Stone on Janushoved last month, this scrapbook of languid collages somehow sounds both tentative and assured. This is especially true of the harmonic elements, which usually take the form of gentle string plucks and soft synth blankets. It’s as if Folke knows exactly what to add to the pastoral cross-sections of nature they’ve gathered and yet doesn’t want to assert too much of a human presence. The result is a delicate dialogue between elements both witnessed and contributed: summer showers dust a pensively strummed guitar with droplets in “Askelys”; a radiant zither(?) loop joins the sun in dappling a shady seaside copse with light in “Lyset var sølv.” Unsurprisingly, though, my favorite track might be “Understrøm,” an unaccompanied field recording that casts a nocturnal shadow amidst the otherwise well-lit suite.
Noise Not Music 