MULTICAST DYNAMICS - Scandinavia

For the third chapter of what presents itself as a quadrilogy, the digital soundscapes of Samuel Van Dijk, aka Multicast Dynamics, return to grace the Denovali catalogue. His is rightfully one of the ambient blends set to define the closing year, representing an "alternative" outpost to the one centred on impact and on the resemantisation of the sacred that, starting from Tim Hecker, has led into Room40 territory (Lawrence English, John Chantler, the latest masterpiece from Rafael Anton Irisarri). The sonic perspective Van Dijk proposes instead has more to do with a "controlled", strongly concrete impressionism, thus far removed from celestial paintings and floating immersions.

A soundscape that, where in the previous "Aquatic Systems" seemed to draw its building blocks from certain shadowy deep-techno leftovers (the affinities with Voices From The Lake and solo Neel were countless, as were those with Biosphere straddling the two decades) in order to phonograph abstract subjects, on "Scandinavia" takes on decidedly more earthly and imaginative connotations. Borrowing one of the geographic settings most inspiring to ambient composers and narrowing it down from the "North" to the peninsula "alone", the Dutch artist softens the sound designer's garb to put on, alongside it, the warmer, more "human" clothes of the musician in the most classic sense.

The result draws decisively close to the landscapes suspended over dub skeletons of the latest Loscil. What is enclosed within the album's eight landscapes is not so much the sensations evoked by contemplating Scandinavian lands, nor equally many accounts (via field recordings or testimonies of any kind) of their sonic nature, nor the results of a phenomenological contemplation in the manner of Thomas Köner. Except for the isolation between flows and silences of the splendid title track, which falls right back onto the latter's tracks, this is instead more a matter of free mimetic associations tied to seemingly accidental details.

It is therefore hard to give an objectifiable, specific reading to each individual track, whose constitutive circumstances are by nature deliberately elusive, undefined. In the mixed calls of "Rauta" the acoustic soul of a sparse yet ever-fascinating fauna seems to unfurl; in the liquid cavities of "Kohta", "Kesto" and "Sarja" ice and snow seem to rise up as protagonists; "Massa" and "IMU" introduce faint rhythmic elements and put themselves forward as representations of the underground, intangible vitality of the places described. All in all, this is an ambient music that here starts from sequences of memories and recollections, images to "imitate", to reclaim and to dust off through sound.

Van Dijk thus seems, on one hand, to want to return to Eno's original definition, turning his miniatures into fitting counterweights for positioning himself between sensations and visions as part of the Scandinavian landscape. On the other hand, he doesn't give up on a mimetic intent that he seems to prefer over the more classic categories of "evocation" (that impressionism to which Loscil himself can be traced back, with due delicacy), "immersion" or "contemplation". Still oscillating on the border between traditionalism and a push towards a new perspective, "Scandinavia" is in any case the first真 manifesto of intent from an artist who is far more than promising.

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16/12/2015