Free improvisers, experimental musicians, and foley artists differ in their methods, but practitioners of all three arts can unite around their attraction to sounds that’ll raise your hackles. This collaboration between improvisational woodwinds player Mats Gustafsson and electronic musician Joachim Nordwall (of the Skull Defekts and the iDealist) could soundtrack a bookshelf full of straight-to-video freak-out flicks. The hyperbolic, mostly all-caps titles that these two Swedes have conferred upon the record’s eight tracks suggest that they aren’t unaware of this. “THERE ARE SOME WORLDS WHERE DREAMS ALL DIE (en glad stund),” for example, opens the album with a commingling of bring-out-the-dead cadences and lung-withering exhalations that will give your subwoofer and the more panic-inclined recesses of your unconscious a workout. Many of the sounds on the album could perform cinematic functions or trigger a reflexive response from an unsuspecting audience. The sputtering synths on “LOVE SHOWS IN HER SMILE: IT IS CONFIDENT (panik),” for instance, could score a ray-gun shoot-out scene. If the subliminal pulses and long tones on fluteophone (a flute fitted with an alto sax mouthpiece) from “OH, SAID THE STRANGE MIND, YOU WANT ME TO THINK FOR YOU (det blir aldrig bättre)” don’t have your date leaning into your neck to hide their eyes, they’re really not into you.
Mats Gustafsson & Joachim Nordwall’s Their Power Reached Across Space and Time, To Defy Them Was Death or Worse is available through Bandcamp.