Jasper TX
Singing Stones

Format: CD

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TRACKLIST:

1. Stillness
2. This Barren Land
3. They’ve Flown Away and Left Us Here
4. Last Boat In
5. A Box of Wood in the Storm
6. Not Leaving, Not Really
7. Sleeping Rivers
8. Into the Sea
9. Mornings After

All music by Dag Rosenqvist
Mastered by Christopher Leary

LISTEN TO:

A Box of Wood in the Storm (Excerpt)

INFORMATION:

»Singing Stones« is the fifth album proper from Jasper TX. Over almost 60 minutes, we are told a heartfelt story of windswept islands in past times, a small community surrounded by the dark sea. It’s a story of sadness, of being left behind, a story shrouded in darkness and death, but not without a glimpse of light – in hope of a possible reunion.

This is a personal album, allowing us a glimpse not only of Dag Rosenquist’s unique musical skills, but also his inner life, his beliefs and his compassion. And by echoing our not so distant history, with »Singing Stones« he actually manages to teach us all a little bit about ourselves.

REVIEWS:

Göteborgs-Posten, PM Jönsson:

Fragment från Gunnar Ekelöfs dikt Om hösten landar i huvudet när jag lyssnar på Jasper TX (Dag Rosenqvist) nya album. Någonting bortomnära i det som är hitomfjärran skrev den store diktaren. Jasper TX musik låter ofta som den samtidigt är långt borta och mycket nära, särskilt i låtarna som samtalar med tystnaden, när gitarren, elektroniken och melodierna försvinner in i ett hav av tankar. När stillheten vibrerar. Ekon av andra nutida klangmålare finns, men allra mest är det en musiker som funnit en egen röst. (4/5)

The Sound Projector (online), Ed Pinsent:

We’ve been receiving some fairly dark and opaque releases from the excellent Fang Bomb label in Sweden these last few weeks…much of it just perfect fodder to feed my brooding soul…but here comes Jasper TX, whose Singing Stones (FB010) is a sunlit, melodic antidote to much of that industrialised gloom. However, Dag Rosenqvist’s musical episodes are also highly melancholic, all that afore-mentioned sunlight tempered with many a rain-streaked window and a tragedian’s bowed head on this beautiful, valedictory record. With its slow instrumental hymns such as ‘This Barren Land’ and ‘Sleeping Rivers’, you could really use this fogged-out record to contemplate the icy stillness of a February Sunday morning and let it act as a balm to salve thy aching heart. Recommended.

Bagatellen, Paul Baran:

Over the last few years, Gothenburg’s Dag Rosenqvist has been quietly assembling an emotionally charged back catalogue of sonic naturalism, with releases such as the The Darkness and last year’s Black Sleep, making us take notice of an emerging talent. But his Bergmanesque take on a desolate ambient Americana has at last finally found its creative apogee on the Fang Bomb release, Singing Stones.

If there was one criticism to be leveled, it could be that Rosenqvist was somewhat too much in thrall with his influences in the land of Laptopia, in the guises of Tim Hecker and Oren Ambarchi. Yet perhaps there was influence from these artists in carving out his own voice, in the way that Renaissance artists would copy each other’s Disegno to achieve their own singular harmony.

Mastering a spare use of instrumentation from Dictaphone recordings to granulated wind chimes, Rosenqvist sets each piece up via the drama of atmosphere and through a slow magmatic positioning of sound elements. Carefully avoiding the earlier site-specific strategies of say, Brian Eno, with his landmark opus, On Land (1982), Rosenqvist elects a more personal mimesis through the politics of a small island community in Sweden.

“Stillness” begins with a distress SOS drone, not entirely dissimilar in its atonal urgency to populist film composer Hans Zimmer’s “Joker” theme in the film The Dark Knight, before ascending into a sunlit meta-stasis of drone and counterdrone, only hampered by the reliance of tape-looped guitar notes that, for my ears, seem a little too tried and tested.

“This Barren Land” ups the creative ante and the cinematic potency of the album is assured with gentle, processed guitar weaving in an out of imagined shoreline topographies redolent of Casper Friederich’s sublime nature studies.

The pieces stand alone conceptually and usually progress from catharsis to hope in tone. Weather systems seem to come and go like characters on the landscape as much as found musical objects. “A Box of Wood in the Storm” is one such piece that extemporises this approach, opening with a demented impersonation of Henry Cowell and evoking wild storms through heavily reverberated piano, before settling into two cloud-rolling chords.

Indeed, so powerful and pure is the melancholy atmosphere of these pieces, one is reminded of the final scenes of emotive films like Lars Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, or the 1997 film adaptation of Russell Bank’s novel, Affliction, when we bear witness to the brutal outcome of a family Stockholm Syndrome. The music contained within this CD would be the perfect accompaniment to such emotional catharsis, and for that matter a thousand others.

Dag Rosenqvist has not only outgrown his formative influences on this lovely record, but has found a way of creating a very special brand of musical humanism through an unaffected interface, between the human soul and inhuman technology.

Boomkat:

Very much a talent on the ascendence, Dag Rosenqvist returns with a swift follow-up to last year's Closet Ghosts EP, and the full-length on Miasmah, Black Sleep. While those two releases marked out career highpoints for Rosenqviist, Singing Stones finds him continuing on his upward trajectory, serving up a truly beautiful - not to mention accessible - collection of cinematic electronic compositions. You won't hear many artists who are this adept when it comes to wringing emotion from their laptops, and introductory track 'Stillness' provides an instantly breathtaking blend of lyrical digital timbres and immersive field recordings; you'll hear footsteps trudging across muddy ground and far off bells pealing out in the distance - it's lovely stuff. Next comes the exquisitely subtle 'This Barren Land', an electroacoustic drone piece that doesn't initially seem to be doing anything that's especially out of the ordinary, but the subtlety and depth of the piece ensures it worms its way into your heart. Now the tone is set, Rosenqvist opens up with some melodic developments, bringing delicate tuned percussion and filtered guitar progressions to 'They've Flown Away And Left Us Here', while 'Last Boat In' brings together fluttering vibraphone melodies and crashing waves on a beach. The set-adrift feel persists throughout, as cued by titles like 'A Box Of Wood In The Storm', 'Into The Sea' and 'Sleeping Rivers', the latter of which cultivates an Oren Ambarchi-like low-end drone, while flickers of hiss bombard slow-swelling chords. Singing Stones is an exceptional album, artfully constructed and sequenced in a way that preserves its enigmatic feel, continually shifting between coy tunefulness and glorious abstraction. Superb.

Norman Records:

My mum and Dad's cat when I was a teenager was called Jasper. he was ace, a totally neurotic seal point Siamese who ate all my jumpers & shredded the curtains, trashed the christmas tree, got locked in an holidaying neighbours house for a week and stole another neighbours sunday roast of the table (in front of them). Nostalgia aside, we have a new CD in by neo-droner & sound designer Jasper TX called 'Singing Stones' which had Clint & I cooing over its cover like the quiet design spods we may well be. The most sumptuous aerial photo of the countryside (where???), bathed in a radiant glow of sunshine, it's complemeted by the grand, moving ambient cacophony inside, where the journey begins with soothing waves of delicious drifting ala Stars of the Lid is underpinned with the sound of digital insects munching their sandwiches, the wind gently caressing their storm shelter as they cling to the virtual peaks of a desolate musical mountain, somewhere, sometime. I'm most intrigued by this generation of sonic adventurers, their use of deeply affecting ambient tools, spliced with fascinating laptop future-glitch & experimental dub/noise textures and calamitous classical abstractions. I'm sure fans of the likes of Machinefabriek will devour this alarmingly interesting CD. It'd take me a good 2 hours to review it in depth, such is the scope of imagination/detail on here. Really worth your attention, housed in a tri-fold card sleeve on Fang Bomb.

De:Bug, Multpara:

"Singing Stones" ist Dag Rosenqvists fünftes Soloalbum, sein Hauptinstrument ist die Gitarre, geschichtet und verfremdet, geboten werden menschenleere Landschaften in cinematischer Breite. Fennesz mag einem da in den Sinn kommen, dessen digitale Klangbrüche und Rockresiduen im Distortionbad jedoch fehlen hier ganz. Stattdessen zieht sich hier durch alle Stücke eine Wehmut und fast lähmende Traurigkeit, die für mich Jasper TX in die Nähe von The Battle of Land and Sea rückt – obwohl er viel ambienter arbeitet, und eher wie die erste Porn Sword Tobacco (auch aus Göteborg) in einem Limbo zwischen Rauschen und instrumentalen Fragmenten hängt, aber eben viel verlorener klingt – Musik kurz vorm Verstummen. Das klappt so nur unter Zurückhaltung beim Ausstellen von technischer Virtuosität und Spielfreude, dennoch sind die Stücke sehr bewusst, sicher und mit aufmerksamem Ohr in Form gegossen, bauen sich in großen Bögen auf, und alle neun klingen sie verschieden. Schöne Platte, und an gewissen Tagen der Tröster, der nicht plappert.

Cyclic Defrost, Adam D Mills:

The ever prolific Dag Rosenqvist returns once again with his fourth full-length album in eighteen months (not to mention EPs and other assorted ephemera). Such a busy release schedule immediately brings to mind the old quantity over quality debate: surely, if someone is releasing this much music, it can’t all be good? Can it?

The thing is, in the case of Rosenqvist, it can and is. Some of his releases are better than others, sure, but unlike Merzbow (for example) nothing in his catalogue feels like the result of a routine hard disc cleanup.

Singing Stones is the sixth Jasper TX album overall, and finds Rosenqvist exploring a similar territory to Black Sleep, released late last year on Miasmah. Though perhaps not as overtly dark as that record, the subtly shifting drones and crackly field recordings of ‘This Barren Land’ and ‘Last Boat In’ are much more steeped in shadow than the more post-rock oriented feel of I’ll Be Long Gone Before My Light Reaches You or In A Cool Monsoon. A distant-sounding guitar chimes a subdued melody on the elegiac ‘They’ve Flown Away and Left Us Here’, and is echoed by solemn glockenspiel. One of the album’s most melodic pieces, it’s also one of its most heartbreaking.

On ‘A Box of Wood in the Storm’, the damaged insides of a well-worn piano lead into a shimmering drone, airy drone, underpinned by another of Rosenqvist’s trademark melodies. The frail melodica of ‘Not Leaving, Not Really’ recalls In A Cool Monsoon, while ‘Sleeping Rivers’ will again invite comparisons to Fennesz and/or Tim Hecker.

It’s the nearly ten-minute ‘Into the Sea’ that plunges Singing Stones to its deepest depths, however. After four minutes of almost inaudible submarine rumbling, the far-off tinkle of a piano begins to emerge from the gloom. It’s soon joined by melodica and a gently glittering drone, which after another four minutes are again subsumed by the abyss. Returning to the surface, Rosenqvist brings us ‘Mornings After’, a delicate, sun-dappled piece that seems in many ways the inevitably optimistic response to everything that preceded it.

The Milk Factory:

The prolific Dag Rosenqvist has been progressively developing his particular blend of dense and bleak treated guitar textures and refined the sound of his solo project, Jasper TX over the years. The Swede’s first album, I’ll Be Long Gone Before My Light Reaches You, was released in 2005 on Lampse, and since, Rosenqvist has published a number of records on Lidar, Kning Disk, Miasmah and Slaapwel, refining both his sound and approach with each new tome. The pace of releases has steadily increased in the last couple of years, and while SMGT is currently releasing Rosenqvist’s collaboration with Anduin, Swedish imprint Fang Bomb is bringing out his latest solo sonic excursion.

Following on from his last album, Black Sheep, published on Miasmah, and the Closet Ghosts EP on Fenêtre, Singing Stones sees Rosenqvist return once again to his widescreen cinematic soundscapes build around layers of treated acoustic and electric guitars and gentle electronics. Right from the opening sequence of this record, Stillness, Rosenqvist weaves beautiful textures, dense atmospheric sound waves and discreet field recordings to create a piece with vast emotional scope and great evocative power. But, while there are great sweeping moments as the melody develops almost imperceptibly, it is actually the smaller details that grab the attention. Specs of acoustic guitars get progressively shrouded in a dense sonic cloud while static noises sparkle in the background, and later on, a playful breeze brings another gritty element to the piece. On They’ve Flown Away And Left Us Here, Rosenqvist uses similar effects, but captures the mood in a very different way by leaving a series of chords hanging up in the air and progressively wrapping them in a somewhat discreet cloak of sounds and empty noise, while on Last Boat In and A Box Of Wood In The Storm, which follow, he opens up to more diverse sound sources, playing with white noise and delicate chime-like forms on the former, before venturing into resolutely electro acoustic territory on the first half of the latter.

On Sleeping Rivers and Into The Sea, which come toward the end of the record, Rosenqvist pushes the use of field recordings further by giving them a central role in these two pieces, with the latter doing away with music entirely for almost half of it before a melody is progressively lifted out of the arid textures and layer upon layer of lush guitar work are added. Much earlier on, on This Barren Land, Rosenqvist develops another rather arid composition, but here, it is solely with guitar sounds, stretched and processed, that he achieves this. Indeed, while elsewhere, he creates extremely dense layered formations from numerous recordings of guitar elements, here Rosenqvist chooses to use the same elements, but arrange them into a slow-moving drone which eventually dissolves into sparse blank noises.

Singing Stones signals yet another step forward for Jasper TX, as Rosenqvist expands his already impressively vast sound to incorporate new textures and angles. The album collects stunning organic compositions which, while appearing rather cold, are actually extremely evocative and emotionally charged. Rosenqvist has already been gaining the respect of press and fans alike, and this latest solo effort only confirms that there is undoubtedly more to come from the man. 4.6/5

Vital Weekly, Frans de Waard:

As Jasper TX, Swedish musician Dag Rosenqvist released four previous albums, none of which were reviewed here. The only time his name popped up in these pages, was when we reviewed his two collaborations with Rutger Zuydervelt/Machinefabriek. But perhaps it was something to go by, since what he does here bares resemblance to those collaborations. Rosenqvist likes his guitar as much as he likes his laptop. He records his guitar, treats it, but then he also likes to hear us how his guitar sounds. Throughout these pieces we hear the guitar which sounds as a guitar, sometimes present and clear, such as in 'Into The Sea', but then at other times also totally unrecognizable. He adds a little bit of field recordings, but mainly, at least that's what I think, its build from his guitar and various manipulations. The press text mentions the fact that Rosenqvist's music resemblances paintings, layer over layer. I'd like to add: take two colors and mix them on end, but use all the various stages of mixing the colors. That's what I think Rosenqvist does. He records one or two pieces of guitar and then starts fiddling around by whatever means, to present an endresult that is built from these variations, along with the two original recordings - or any multiply from that of course. A mighty fine work, that no doubt appeals to fans to Machinefabriek, with whom I can see much resemblance. Micro ambient glitch guitar. A truly fine work, if perhaps not always the biggest surprise.

Tokafi, Max Schaefer:

Dag Rosenqvist buries his crepuscular reverberations in a dream ground, a dream settlement, the farmland, where the unconscious is ousted and wonders at tiny trembles and dense windstorms alike. Rosenqvist never surprises such origins, but he falls into them easily enough, providing, in turn, a hardy melting of bleary, mildly discordant activity and feint melody.

The pieces creep along a tenuous thread, where content and method of delivery struggle, cloaking all in a motley medley of frequencies, contemplative uses of blunt, scattered sound, and intermittent flashes of vivid color. "This Barren Land", as so many pieces here, is a distillation of unrefined desolation that's magnetic in its compulsion and surprisingly poised in its delivery. As a whole, in fact, the album is not only immediate, becoming at times even physical in its use of dynamics between near-silence and discheveled noise, but well-rounded, particularly in comparison to some of his past works, which, though not without merit, occasionally came across as simply a loose collection of blown-out sketches.

For the rest of the album, an ample number of pieces serve as potent examples of Rosenqvist's basic approach to sound arrangement, where compressed hisses, minute crackling, plaintive drones and loops of hesitant, near-melody fall in and out of step, resulting in an appealing, if pedestrian, roadmap of loss, waiting and disintegration.

The Silent Ballet, Richard Allen:

Sweden’s Dag Rosenqvist (Jasper TX) has been coming on strong in the past twelve months, with an impressive Black Sleep disk followed by the stellar EP, Closet Ghosts. Rosenqvist has drifted far from his post-rock beginnings and continues to branch into new territories; his new work is virtually unlinkable to that of his Lampse debut. Two major changes have taken place in the ensuing years: each release has grown more unified, and the level of abrasion has dropped.

Singing Stones is easily Jasper TX’s most restrained work to date. The cover photo is pleasingly pastoral, although the trifold packaging seems unnecessary given that two sides are completely white and two others are plain green boxes. Ironically, the packaging serves as a perfect metaphor for the music found within: the project holds great promise, but a few of the tracks are embarrassingly underdeveloped and should have been excised. As Rosenqvist proved last year, a solid EP can make a bigger impact than an overstuffed album.

According to the press release, Singing Stones tells the tale of “windswept islands, a small community surrounded by the dark sea.” The track titles relay the rest of the story: “Stillness”, “They’ve Flown Away and Left Us Here”, “Last Boat In”, “Mornings After”. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture a lonely island with a few inhabitants, wondering if they will ever again be visited by the outside world. While listening, I am reminded of the movie, “The Secret of Roan Inish,” in which selkies convince children to re-inhabit an abandoned seaside village.

The use of field recordings helps to illustrate Rosenqvist’s narrative: lone footsteps, whirling waves, whipping winds. The tracks that utilize natural effects are the most powerful and cinematic, while the others, in comparison, seem sparse. (I’m talking about you, tracks 2, 4, 7 and the first four minutes of 8!) A fair comparison can be made to Elegi’s Varde, which also tells a story, but fleshes it out with frequent sound samples so that every track is distinctive, bearing a sense of place. This is what makes Singing Stones so maddening. It’s easy to imagine how simple changes might have made this one of the best albums of the year: a violin here, a spoken sample there, the shortening of a nine-minute track to five. The less engaging pieces rob this suite of the pathos and yearning that should have been its hallmark.

That being said, Singing Stones also contains some of Jasper TX’s best work – selections so engaging that they justify the price of admission. Opening track “Stillness” is anything but still, beginning with creaks and progressing into a series of layered drones. About halfway through the track, one realizes that a church bell has been tolling all along, perhaps calling the parishioners to one final service, perhaps bemoaning the imminent loss of the island’s citizens. The middle section is loud and thick, after which the instrumentation recedes (save for the bell) and we hear footsteps, as if a rugged, boot-clad fisherman is walking around the wind-swept upper paths, taking a stoic inventory of what is left.

“They’ve Flown Away and Left Us Here” is a simple track with a repeated vinyl itch and a wrenching guitar melody, reminiscent of Closet Ghosts’ “And When We Die, God Makes Angels of Us All”. The guitar is eventually joined by a gentle glockenspiel, which plays the same notes concurrently until the guitar drops out. The glockenspiel then plays one last note before quitting of heartbreak. Afterwards, we are left with an additional minute of radio static, which has been running quietly through the entire song. This static is interrupted periodically for a forlorn click, as if someone is searching on all frequencies for any sign of life, like the survivors on “Lost”.

“A Box of Wood in the Storm” begins with what sounds like a demented harp, then descends into feedback and drone. At the five-minute mark, just when we think the track has peaked, an additional layer of guitar enters the mix. My assumption here is that the “box of wood in the storm” is a coffin, drenched and bereft of mourners, save for the shivering ghost of the inhabitant. While this track is preceded by “Last Boat In”, a gentle wash of wave and vibraphone, this calming piece sounds better in its wake. There’s not much to it, but it makes a pleasant coda. The album’s current closer is nice, but offers nothing we haven’t heard in the other tracks; if a fifth were required, I’d choose an edited version of “Into the Sea”.

I had high hopes for this release, and my hopes were both rewarded and dashed: rewarded by some of my favorite tracks of Jasper TX’s career, and dashed by my disappointment in the album as a whole. Singing Stones is a good release that could have been great, and I am haunted by impressions of the album that could have been.