Anthony Linell - Winter Ashes

Album

30 Jan

The Northern Electronics (NE) label has released some of the most forward-thinking electronic music over the past 20 years, utilising its Scandinavian heritage to push the ambient and techno genres over frozen lakes and into remote valleys. Anthony Linell, head honcho of NE, has been instrumental over the last two decades in calving out a mesmerising, absorbing and distinct sound while sticking to local talent.

Winter Ashes is the sixth full-length album released by Anthony Linell. Still, it should be said that the NE boss is not opposed to and is quite prolific when releasing projects under other aliases. Linell mainly saves more techno-orientated productions for the Abdullah Rashim moniker while collaborating with Jonas Rönnberg, better known as Varg, under the Ulwhednar name.

Anthony Linell has been a proponent of deep ambience throughout, with most works being synthesiser-based explorations of melody and the balance between repetition and progression. Winter Ashes continues Linell's lineage of exploratory air with a tinge of techno sensibility. Linell crafts a beautiful atmosphere and instils more mysticism into the northern electronic label with each track on the album, take for example, the first track, 'Path Of Devotion' uses a glacial melody, rich with an oscillation that moves like droplets across a lake, mythological in its ability to draw the listener into a dense and troubling atmosphere below the surface. Linell demonstrates expertise in contrast within Winter Ashes as the album is full of stylish shifts that emulate the style of song crafting Anthony Linell showcases. Taking the tracks' Hávamál' and 'To Feed On Ashes', two wildly contrasting feelings are perpetuated by each of these tracks, and the former is a much busier jubilant piece. ‘Hávamál’ bounces, catapulted upwards by elastic strings. On the other hand, the latter compresses the world with dark rumbles that seem to penetrate the soul, complimented by a hunting, descending melodic motif.

Winter Ashes intends to create these tonal rhythms using slap-back delays placed on the haunting melodic lines. The effect of these delays adds a sort of ghost note rhythm that is evolving below the central leading motif of the tracks, and this technique can be heard in 'Being Water' and 'Practices for Dying' to significant effect. Linell plays with these delays allowing the rhythms to evolve, often fading the effect in and out while increasing feedback to simulate peaks and troughs of energy within admittedly static tonal lines. Linell can extract these shifting rhythms from the melodies with variations that highlight what creativity looks like in minimal electronic music, with a highlight being 'Blood In Their Eyes'. This is a showcase of restraint that less is more and exploration in repetition.

Winter Ashes’ entrancing tones and textures feel like a dream, like rolling mist over the mountains as the sun rises. Linell weaves a dewy stylistic beauty into a hazy sonic landscape filling the mind with hypnotic rhythmic wiriness while incorporating a brisk chill that acts as a peppermint freshness over the body, inducing a shiver over the spine with every passing phrase. The instrumentation Linell uses highlights an otherworldly organic quality that permeates every track, be it the bright plucks of the track 'Codex Regius' or the lush organs of 'Norms of Fate'. Linell uses these almost recognisable, sometimes orchestral, tones to ground the pieces having them play beside more synthetic and inhuman sounds in 'Hall of Judgment'. Linell juxtaposes a deep sustained double-bass tone under an airy mallet tone reminiscent of an abstracted glockenspiel accented with very vocal swells. 'The Final Words' sounds like the muted rhythmic guitar playing inside undulations of electrical buzzing and ambience that continue the contrast and exploration of sound.

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