Erik Wollo: Threshold Point
Projekt

If the emotional temperature seems high on Threshold Point, Norwegian sound artist Erik Wøllo's twenty-third album, there's a good reason for it. Though much of it was composed in Norway, some of the album was written during a 2016 stay in Brooklyn as his sister's illness worsened and death eventually arrived; during that time, he also recorded music at her neighbour's apartment, and here too the tragic circumstances left a powerful imprint on the material produced. Qualities of introspection, melancholy, and humility lend Threshold Point an emotional gravitas greater than the ambient-electronic norm. Certainly it's hard not to think of his sister 'crossing over,' so to speak, when the album title suggests transformation, the idea of advancing beyond a threshold and transitioning from one state into something new.

That sense of an earth-bound realm being left behind and exchanged for a non-corporeal one is captured by “Behind the Clouds” in its slow, mysterious unfurl of synthesizer washes and tones. Yet as appropriately sombre as that opening is, Threshold Point isn't an unwavering exercise in mourning, as the subsequent track, “Traverse,” demonstrates in the insistent propulsion of its rhythms and the sense of affirmation conveyed by its chiming melodic themes. As the nine-minute piece progresses, one surmises that a journey is being undertaken, one hardly bereft of hope but instead one that embraces the future for all the promise it offers.

The album's clear focal point is its four-movement suite “Mosaic of Time,” which proves arresting in weaving African-inflected rhythms and a muffled, horn-like wash into its inaugural part “Route Diverge”; though it would misrepresent Wøllo's music to label it Fourth World, there's definitely a hint of Jon Hassell in the mass that billows across the track's buoyant, sequencer-driven base. Even more driving are the second and third parts, “Threshold Point” and “Hidden Path,” which sprinkle sparse, rather New Age-styled piano figures across muscular tribal-ambient grooves. Certainly some of the album's tone is coloured by the death of Wøllo's sister, but the “Bridge Crossing” movement with which the album ends is anything but sombre; if anything, joy and resilience infuse its dance-inflected rhythms and the interlacing of its swelling synthesizer patterns.

Perhaps because he decided it better enhanced the album's flow, Wøllo opted to break up “Mosaic of Time” with two pieces. Its title a reference to a mountain in Antarctica, “Ravel Peak” provides a suitably majestic interlude between the suite's second and third parts, whereas “Eon” is as perfect an example of becalmed, New Age-styled ambient scene-painting as could be imagined.

July 2018