Soul Music is an intentionally treacherous title. Anyone arriving in search of expressive singing, gospel-derived harmony or the warmth of a rhythm section will instead encounter Joachim Nordwall constructing a dark ceremonial chamber from analogue electronics, percussion, repetition and controlled psychic pressure. Yet the title is not merely ironic. Nordwall is looking for the soul beneath musical style: the animating force that appears when a rhythm has repeated long enough to detach itself from entertainment and become a condition of consciousness. These six pieces do not imitate soul music, but they are intensely concerned with possession, vibration, grief, fire, ritual and the possibility that mechanical sound can touch something inward that language cannot reach.
“Procession” establishes the album’s physical law. A procession is movement with intention, but it is not necessarily progress. It may circle a sacred site, accompany the dead, announce authority or transport participants from ordinary time into ceremonial time. Nordwall’s rhythm advances with that ambiguity. The percussion does not function as a decorative layer placed beneath synthesizer activity; it determines how the body enters the recording. Sounds gather around its pulse like figures joining a nocturnal march. The electronic elements are coarse, compressed and deliberately resistant to atmospheric prettiness. They do not open a panoramic landscape. They narrow the room until the listener becomes acutely conscious of pressure, distance and repetition.
The title also introduces the album’s relationship with grief. Soul Music was dedicated to Joel Brindefalk, the Swedish composer and electronic musician whose work ranged across electroacoustic composition, techno, dub and damaged collage. Brindefalk died in February 2013 at only thirty-seven. Nordwall does not respond with a conventional elegy built from solemn melody or openly sentimental gestures. The dedication instead changes how the album’s repetition is heard. A loop can resemble life continuing after someone has disappeared, the machinery of days proceeding while memory circles an absence it cannot resolve. Repetition becomes both refusal and acceptance: refusal to let a presence vanish completely, acceptance that the recording cannot move backward and restore what has been lost.
“I Am the Fire” is the album’s longest and most imposing statement of identity. The phrase does not describe someone standing near a fire or controlling it. The speaker has become the element itself. Nordwall’s electronics accordingly feel less like objects being played than a force undergoing sustained combustion. There is no conventional dramatic arc in which tension rises toward a single climax. Intensity is treated as a stable state, and the listener must adjust to living inside it. Small changes in texture become enormous because the basic pressure is so constant. A pulse thickens, a frequency becomes more abrasive, an echo begins extending the apparent dimensions of the space. The track teaches a different scale of attention, one suited to ritual, drone and early electronic minimalism rather than song.
Nordwall has long occupied a useful fault line between experimental sound and music connected to the body. His analogue equipment may produce noise, static and severe drones, but rhythm remains a persistent organizing intelligence. Soul Music does not approach acid house or techno as collections of recognizable genre signals to be quoted nostalgically. It returns to their primitive psychological mechanism: a small sequence repeated until it changes the listener’s sense of time. Stripped of club brightness and social release, the mechanism becomes darker and more private. It is dance music after the dancers have gone home, leaving the machines operating in an empty building while something unresolved continues to circulate through the walls.
“The Beauty of Creation and Destruction” compresses the album’s philosophy into barely more than three minutes. Creation and destruction are not presented as moral opposites. Electronic sound makes their intimacy unusually audible. A waveform is created by disturbance; distortion produces new harmonic information by damaging the purity of a signal; decay becomes texture; feedback turns instability into a generating system. Nordwall works inside this doubleness. His sounds often appear to be eroding while they are still being born. The piece has the character of an object assembled from scorched material, yet its damaged surfaces are precisely what make it vivid. Beauty does not arrive after destruction has been repaired. It resides within the changing structure of the damage.
That idea connects the record to industrial music without reducing it to industrial style. Nordwall is less interested in theatrical images of factories, violence or social collapse than in the internal discipline that the best industrial music inherited from minimalism. Repetition is not used because nothing else is happening. Repetition exposes what ordinary musical development conceals. When a pattern remains in place, the listener begins hearing the grain of each sound, the friction between pulse and texture, and the unstable emotional reactions produced by apparently stable material. Boredom, anxiety, fascination and calm may alternate even though the recording itself has barely changed. The music becomes an instrument for observing the listener.
“Soul Vibration” brings the album’s title closest to an explicit thesis. Soul is imagined not as an immortal object sealed inside the body, but as vibration: motion transferred between matter, nervous system and consciousness. This suits Nordwall’s music because vibration ignores the usual distinction between spiritual and physical experience. A low frequency may be measured scientifically while also producing dread, pleasure or a feeling of transcendence. A rhythm can be mechanically generated and still alter breathing, muscular tension and thought. Nordwall does not need to decide whether these responses are mystical or neurological. The recording operates in the region where the two descriptions overlap.
Jean-Louis Huhta’s percussion is crucial to this process. His playing does not humanize the electronics by adding expressive flourish. Instead, acoustic and electronic sources become part of the same ritual apparatus. The drums can feel ancient and technologically displaced at once, suggesting that the desire to enter altered states through repeated impact long predates synthesizers, sequencers and clubs. Nordwall’s machines do not abolish this history. They continue it through different materials. The combination produces music that feels both future-oriented and archaic, as though a ceremony has survived after everyone has forgotten its original language and purpose.
“Acid Ritual” makes that union especially clear. The acidic movement of the synthesizer recalls the vocabulary of the dance floor, but the atmosphere is too constricted and severe to provide uncomplicated release. Instead of carrying a crowd outward into collective euphoria, the pattern drills inward. Acid house is reduced to its writhing electronic nerve, separated from smiley-face imagery, communal optimism and the historical spectacle of rave. What remains is repetition as pharmacology. The sequence continually administers itself, each return strengthening the sense that the music is not representing a ritual but actively performing one upon the listener.
There is genuine pleasure here, but it is the pleasure of surrendering to a system rather than being entertained by variation. Nordwall establishes rules and then allows perception to become unstable inside them. This is why the record can feel minimal without seeming empty. Every piece is built from relatively restricted materials, yet those materials generate a dense field of implications. A pulse may evoke underground club music, religious ceremony, machinery, heartbeat or marching. Noise may seem hostile in one moment and protective in the next, forming a wall that excludes the outside world. The album does not settle these meanings because their movement is part of its psychic activity.
The closing “Psychic Propaganda (Psychic Broadcasting Version)” extends material from Nordwall’s earlier Psychic Propaganda cassette into the album’s larger spiritual and political vocabulary. Propaganda normally refers to messages designed to direct thought, but Nordwall removes language and identifiable doctrine. What remains is influence without argument: repeated sound entering the mind through duration, rhythm and frequency. All music alters consciousness to some degree, but Soul Music makes that transaction unusually exposed. There is no singer whose personality can absorb attention and no narrative offering a safe interpretive path. The listener confronts the mechanism directly.
The phrase “psychic broadcasting” also suggests transmission toward an unknown receiver. A record is produced, pressed in a small edition, distributed through an experimental network and played in rooms the artist will never see. The sound enters private lives under unpredictable conditions. One listener may hear menace, another meditation, another the residue of acid house, another an abstract memorial for someone they never knew. Nordwall sends the signal without controlling its destination. In this sense the album’s soul is not fully contained in the grooves. It is completed differently each time the vibration reaches a body.
Entr’acte was an especially appropriate home for such a work. The label’s austere design language and commitment to experimental electronic music encouraged listeners to encounter releases as concentrated objects rather than lifestyle packages. The edition of 200 copies reinforces the album’s strange intimacy. Soul Music may use the language of broadcasting, procession and collective ritual, but its physical circulation was narrow. It was a transmission sent through a small international network of listeners already inclined to search for significance in difficult frequencies, damaged textures and repetitive structures.
That small scale makes the album’s title feel even more pointed. The commercial category called soul music became one of the great public languages of emotional expression, built around voices capable of making private pain communal. Nordwall’s Soul Music travels in the reverse direction. It removes the voice, narrows the audience and buries emotion inside electronic procedure. Yet grief and devotion remain present. They have simply become structural. The dedication to Brindefalk is not delivered through testimony; it inhabits the record’s persistence, its refusal to separate creation from destruction, and its determination to keep sending vibrations into the space left by a vanished person.
Soul Music ultimately proposes that machines do not prevent spiritual expression. They may provide a route toward it precisely because they can repeat without fatigue, stripping away distraction until a listener encounters the raw activity of attention. Nordwall does not offer comfort, revelation or a tidy movement from darkness into light. He creates an apparatus in which mourning, bodily rhythm, electronic history and altered consciousness can coexist without explanation. The soul here is not a soft glow hidden inside severe music. It is the severe music itself: fire, pressure and vibration continuing in the absence of certainty.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.