Building Instrument: Mangelen Min
Hubro

In the press release for Building Instrument's new album, one passage in particular illuminates in the way it brings the Bergen-based trio's MO into sharp focus: the group's aesthetic “connects them to a kind of international informal movement of artists working with advanced technology yet retaining a homemade style and ethos that can feel more analogue than digital, more human than machine.” Such a description accurately captures the spirit at work on Mangelen Min, the third collection of playful wonderment from Mari Kvien Brunvoll (vocals, electronics, zither, omnichord), Øyvind Hegg-Lunde (drums, percussion), and Åsmund Weltzien (synths, electronics). Interestingly, when the band began in 2008, their plan was to focus on electronic music, but soon thereafter the concept evolved into the explorative acoustic-electronic fusion heard on Mangelen Min.

There's a fresh and spontaneous quality to the material that owes much to the trio's embrace of real-time playing mixed with live sampling and electronic processing. Sonically, the songs are rich, with everything from vibraphone and spacey synthesizers to Hardanger fiddle samples worked into the twelve songs, while stylistically Mangelen Min ranges as widely; it's not uncommon for one song to mesmerize with a strange gamelan-meets-classical baroque hybrid (“Rygge Rygge La La”) and for another to leave the listener swooning (“Vil Du Dit Nok”).

Brunvoll's bright, multi-octave voice, one of Building Instrument's most distinguishing elements, proves entrancing in “Lanke,” especially when paired with a bass-throbbing groove and all manner of colouristic detail. Also memorable, “Alt Forsvinn” underpins soft vocal utterances with the flute-like meander of a mellotron and a skeletal tribal pulse; by comparison, a Balkan-tinged swing animates the title track (whose title roughly translates as ‘the thing missing in my life'), which the trio further enhances with zither figures and a vocal by Brunvoll that's as enchanted as it is enchanting.

The album's longest cut at seven minutes, “Ta Regnet” makes good on the press release's characterization of the trio's music as “art that you can dance to,” even if the wonky workout as presented is hardly the kind played at your standard house or techno club. Still, however unusual a Building Instrument track is, there's typically a crisp groove in place to give the weirdness a solid grounding. Often sounding like wonky transmissions sent to us from some alien civilization, many of the trio's songs are so unusual, they beggar description, such eclecticism ultimately revealing itself as a band signature. Moments on Mangelen Min do occur where one might be reminded of Björk or Múm, yet for the most part Building Instrument sounds like no one but itself.

January 2019