ALOG - Miniatures

Alog are a duo from Tromsø, Norway. Steady, epically steady. Miles away from the pop with which some of their countrymen conquered the world, they're better placed within the pioneering avant-electronic strand that carves choruses and Norwegian wood with sharp tools drawn from computer software, while also digging deep into pure tradition. All of it delivered with a strong dose of accessibility and few pretensions to paradox. Noise symphonies, endless classical foundations, digital sounds, guitars and simple little keyboards (de)compose the perfect whole, splintering it into multiple movements and shaping it with the hands of some other guru.

We're in the living room of the Rune Grammofon house, designed by experts in reckless tightrope-walking, people who script other people who don't write, but think. And so the detonators of "St. Paul Sessions II" dilute certain maritime compositions from Kieran Hebden's (Four Tet) "Rounds", still insisting on something resembling a dreamy, half-awake valium music box, while a single, silent chord of filthy guitar acts as connective tissue. The setting is that of sunset, the colours those of dawn, and the substance is a stroll through this entire interval. Likewise, the samples of "Severe Punishment And Lasting Bliss" take on different shapes that cut the ribbon on each new room, as if it were a suite stripped of all comforts but full of countless chambers. More distorted guitars, more "dronic" posturing, more edges smoothed by quasi-melodies that simplify the non-drastic unfolding of the various movements. And so the sea I mentioned takes the shape of a "Pesce Spada" journeying through the depths, finally with glorious percussion marking out the rhythms of a deep-sea hunt. This time, the drones gather the molecules of cold liquids and create the habitat for this fauna.

All of this, together with the tribal gathering of "Buffalo Demon", the ritual of "Change Position" and the smoke-filled company of "Building Instruments", lights a bonfire on the glaciers just as the Residents did on "Eskimo": dialogues, wolf calls, screams and escapes from the unbearable, approached with an anthropological, reflective spirit. Picture a chair occupied by a salmon-skinner, while the village goes about its life around him. This is the second half of the record, the more successful one, in clear contrast with the first, which leans more heavily on pure sound (though never getting it wrong), avoiding dissecting it or loading it with too much meaning. "Miniatures" is truly a succession of scaled-down sociological models, one of those works that hops the fences of do-re-mi to trespass onto private property.

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30/04/2026