Rutger Hauser: The Swim
Adaadat/Tutl

This adventurous sophomore effort from Southeast London-based sextet Rutger Hauser should appeal to fans of Tortoise (at its most experimental), King Crimson (the ‘70s incarnation), and the like. The improv-minded outfit came into being six years ago as the brainchild of drummer John Harries and bassist Jamie Coe and now includes guitarist Jon Klaemint Hofgaard, cellist Rose Dagul, and Lisa Busby and Ian Stonehouse on playback media and homemade electronics. Actively part of the Southeast London experimental scene, Rutger Hauser's also the co-founder of the independent label The Lumen Lake, which recently issued the split cassette that paired Wendra Hill For with Grey Sea Over a Cold Sky Ensemble (the latter's B side featuring contributions from Harries, Hofgaard, and Coe, incidentally).

The Swim, laid down during a week-long, mid-2018 session in a big, wood-paneled room at a community hall called Sólarmagn in the Faroe Islands, exudes that loose, in-the-moment feel of like-minded souls exploring communally and testing out different directions. The album's mostly first or second takes, though some post-recording overdubs were added to the eight cuts by Stonehouse.

The group's explorative bent is evident the moment “Maximum Tourist | Fjallavatn” rouses into being and its various strands gradually conjoin into a semi-coherent ensemble expression. Drums lumber alongside guitar shadings, with the guttural groan of the cello (presumably) suggesting the awakening of some primordial leviathan. By comparison, “Hestur and Koltur | Hestur og Koltur” seems less spontaneously generated and more the product of post-production design. In the first minute, spoken self-disclosures by a woman (“I write you because I do not understand myself...”) are duplicated, staggered, and repeated, after which they're subjected to even more extreme treatments and augmented by electronics, percussive tinklings, guitar and cello textures, noise ruptures, and other effects.

With a theremin-like sound warbling across its slo-mo funk pulse, “Five Pages in the Lost Ledger | Leiti” plays like some instrumental Crimson-meets-Tortoise showdown or some out-there experimental side-project of the Chicago band. Considerable dust's kicked up by the motorik 7/4 of “On the Rotifer Conchilus Volvox | Golmansskor,” Rutger Hauser seemingly intent on barreling down its own self-imagined autobahn during the tune's propulsive ride. Jagged strafings by Hofgaard pepper the groove, the whole impressing as some weird and jittery krautrock hoedown. At album's end, the groaning leviathan from the opening track re-surfaces for “Faroes 01 _ Nólsoy, Looking North | Rúnarsteinur í Sandavágskirkju,” the beat elements replaced in this second go-round by grainy radio transmissions, convulsions, and other kinds of toxicity.

August 2019