Golden Ivy - Kläppen LP
Liner notes (printed on back sleeve)
2019
Malmö Inre
On his previous album for Malmö Inre - Monika - Ivar Lantz promised us the width of the Scandinavian forests within reach. With this new album, again under the guise of Golden Ivy; a new chapter of that same tale is laid forth. Truly siblings born from the same creative flow, they both stand alone from Lantz’s previous musical endeavors and together to support each other. Kläppen is an epic mellow experience for both the body and the mind. An almost family friendly record for the home stereo system, and yet quietly but daringly explorative of the avant-garde terrain.
While the title is identical to an actual place on the map, don’t let that fool you. The word itself is an old Swedish way of describing a hilltop, and can still be heard in local talk to this day. But in the context of this album, it is essentially an imagined place. And it’s important that we all have a place like this to go to. A place where our theta waves oscillate in the right rhythms. With his violin and flute, Lantz have found the right tools to harness these rhythms and carve them into sound waves, guiding us there. Kläppen is, alas, both the trip and the destination. Ouroboros! Seemingly guided by the forces of nature: the strokes of the violin move like the playful rhythms of the wind. Chimes flutter away like reflections of the sun in the water. Machines putter about in the distance. The soft thudding bass lines like mossy stones along the path. The trip and the destination.
As he did on Monika, Lantz is respectfully playing around with the perception of traditional music, both in its connection to geography and to nature.
With the fourth world musical concept of Jon Hassel as a liberating influence, Lantz in turn finds another field of possible music. A kind of music that evokes the feeling of folk and of the northern climate, as if half-remembered from a dream. A glimpse into a parallel version of history where the traditional music of Scandinavia was not divided into a genre of its own but was intertwined with modern technology and the mass of a multicultural musical ancestry.
Lantz is however content with not giving these songs too much context. There are subtle hints yes, but at the core of his expression is an urge towards something resembling minimalism. A unifying expression that both diffuses and heightens the awareness of its inherent influences. The music is the message, and the music is a language onto itself. Unfolding like a flower, it reveals a richer story told in sound. Crouch gently behind a bush and you’ll catch phrases of what could be Japanese ambient, or the afro-centric jazz of Don Cherry - the chilly melancholy of Vini Reilly - or perhaps the motorik kosmische of post-war Germany. You could go on and on like this in the fashion of traditional music journalism, but let’s not. Let’s just enjoy these six songs and the way they unfold in our minds like a world of possibilities, without ever reaching the destination.