Saturn and the Sun - 2018 - In Love With the Extreme

iDEAL Recordings – iDEAL169  

In Love With the Extreme does not begin at maximum intensity. It begins by withholding the mechanism that will eventually control the listener. The title piece first appears as a dense electronic atmosphere, a slowly shifting field of buzz, friction and low-frequency pressure whose edges are difficult to locate. Something rhythmic seems to exist beneath it, but the rhythm is initially too submerged to function as a beat. Gradually, a kick drum becomes perceptible, not entering dramatically from outside but rising from underneath the noise as though it had been operating miles below the surface all along. By the time the pulse is unmistakable, Saturn and the Sun have already altered the listener’s sense of scale. The music has not transformed from noise into techno. It has revealed that techno was buried inside the noise.

That delayed recognition defines the album. Joachim Nordwall and Henrik Rylander do not treat noise and rhythm as opposing materials that must be fused through clever production. They understand pulse as one of noise’s possible internal conditions. A distorted mass can contain repetition; a drone can behave like a long rhythmic cycle; a kick drum can become so overloaded that it ceases to mark time and begins altering the apparent dimensions of the room. The duo’s achievement lies in allowing those identities to remain unstable. One listens to a beat, then realizes one is listening to pressure. One listens to static, then discovers that it is moving in cycles.

The album was recorded in 2017, while Nordwall and Rylander were still connected through The Skull Defekts, the Gothenburg group in which they had worked together since the mid-2000s. By the time In Love With the Extreme appeared in September 2018, The Skull Defekts had ended. The record consequently occupies an unusual threshold. It is not a posthumous continuation of that band’s ritual rock language, nor is it an entirely new beginning between unfamiliar collaborators. It captures two musicians removing guitars, ensemble interplay and recognizable rock architecture until only their shared fascination with repetition, physical vibration and altered mental states remains.

Saturn and the Sun is a wonderfully disproportionate name for a duo. The Sun is immediate, radiant and apparently central; Saturn is distant, slow, cold and surrounded by visible rings made from debris. One represents overwhelming presence, the other discipline, orbit and duration. The music contains both principles. Its frequencies can be glaring enough to feel solar, but its structures move with Saturnian patience. Nothing is permitted to arrive quickly merely because an immediate impact would be easier. The tracks accumulate pressure through rotation, returning again and again until repetition begins changing the consciousness receiving it.

The title In Love With the Extreme is similarly more complicated than a simple declaration of enthusiasm for loud or abrasive sound. “Extreme” can describe a measurable outer limit, the point beyond which a system cannot continue operating normally. To become romantically attached to that point is to prefer instability over comfort, to return willingly to conditions where control may fail. Nordwall and Rylander do not merely endure the threshold. They construct music around the desire to remain there.

The cover presents that desire as a bodily entanglement. A black-clothed figure crouches among branches, undergrowth and tangled material, the face almost completely obscured. The hands appear to be handling something within the thicket, but the image refuses to clarify whether the person is trapped, hiding, working or participating in a private rite. Green and gray vegetation blurs the foreground, making the photograph seem partially viewed through surveillance, camouflage or damaged memory. The gothic lettering supplies ceremonial severity, yet the scene itself is earthy, awkward and close to the ground. Extremity does not occur on a heroic mountaintop. It takes place in the weeds.

That visual combination of concealment and bodily involvement suits Henrik Rylander’s wider relationship with images. His professional work as a forensic photographer and his parallel activity as a conceptual and sound artist place documentation beside disturbance. A forensic photograph is supposed to make material evidence legible, but this cover does the opposite. It withholds the decisive detail. The viewer receives a body, a location and an activity without the information required to identify what has happened. Saturn and the Sun create sound through the same strategy. Effects are audible, but their causes remain concealed.

The opening title track is the album’s most complete statement of this method. Its nearly twelve minutes move from viscous electronics into a subterranean rhythmic formation without offering a clean transitional point. The kick is less a drum than a periodic disturbance in the ground. Higher frequencies scrape against it, while broad clouds of distortion prevent the beat from becoming a stable dance-floor guide. The body may follow the pulse, but the mind remains uncertain about the environment containing it.

This is techno deprived of its social lighting. There is no polished club, no visible performer manipulating a crowd and no promise that collective movement will produce release. Rhythm functions as compulsion. The listener locks onto it because the surrounding field is too unstable to provide another reference point. The beat offers orientation, then uses that dependence to pull the body deeper into the recording.

“Saturn War Chant” makes the ritual dimension explicit. The title imagines battle music belonging not to an earthly nation but to an immense slow-moving planet. A conventional war chant gathers bodies, synchronizes emotion and transforms fear into group momentum. Saturn’s version would operate at another scale, its repetitions measured in long orbits rather than marching tempo. The track reduces that impossible idea into seven minutes of bruised bass, corroded pulse and electronic abrasion.

Its aggression is heavy rather than fast. Distorted low frequencies move with the stubbornness of something too massive to accelerate quickly. The music does not charge forward. It advances by making retreat seem impossible. Higher electronic signals gather around the bass like sparks, radio interference or metallic insects, but the central force remains slow and gravitational.

The word “chant” is significant because chanting transforms repetition into collective intention. A phrase repeated once is information; repeated dozens of times, it can become belief, hypnosis or bodily regulation. Saturn and the Sun remove the literal words while preserving that function. The recurring electronic shape does not tell the listener what to believe. It creates the mental condition in which belief might become possible.

“Cross the Line” occupies another eleven-minute expanse, but its tension is sharper and more exposed. The title identifies the moment at which a boundary ceases to protect the person approaching it. Crossing a line may be liberation, trespass, commitment or irreversible error. The track never explains which meaning applies. Instead, it makes the boundary audible through a relationship between thin, high-frequency stress and disturbed sub-bass.

The upper register can feel almost antiseptic, a narrow electrical pressure suspended above the listener, while the low material moves beneath it with less visible force. Together they create the sensation of passing through a charged threshold. There is no dramatic explosion announcing that the crossing has occurred. The listener simply notices that the previous side is no longer accessible.

This restraint connects the duo to the severe rhythmic electronics of Mika Vainio without reducing the track to imitation. Nordwall had worked with Vainio, and the album appeared after Vainio’s death, so the resemblance carries emotional as well as formal weight. Yet Saturn and the Sun remain dirtier, more tangled and less committed to the solitary perfection of each impact. Their signals seem to struggle against accumulated material, as though every pulse must pass through brush, rust and damaged wiring before reaching the speakers.

“Cross the Line” also reveals how deliberately the duo uses monotony. The word is often treated as criticism, implying an absence of ideas. Here monotony becomes a tool for stripping away superficial demand. When the listener stops waiting for a new section, attention moves inward. Tiny alterations in frequency and density become immense. The music teaches perception through deprivation, refusing novelty until the supposedly unchanging surface begins exposing constant motion.

“Pleasure Is Relief” closes the album with its most psychologically revealing title. Pleasure is usually defined positively, as the presence of enjoyment. Calling pleasure “relief” proposes a darker mechanism: pleasure is the temporary cessation of pressure, pain, fear or craving. The enjoyable state has no independent existence. It is recognized only because something intolerable briefly stops.

This principle governs extreme music. The harshness creates its own baseline, and any reduction in density can feel euphoric. A frequency disappears, the bass loosens or a small opening enters the texture, and the listener experiences release disproportionate to the actual change. Saturn and the Sun do not need to introduce melody or softness. They manipulate pressure until less pressure becomes pleasure.

The closing track’s charred pulse and damaged electronics make relief inseparable from the conditions that created the need for it. The listener cannot obtain release without first entering discomfort. This circularity gives the album an almost addictive structure. Extremity produces tension; tension makes relief pleasurable; pleasure encourages a return to extremity. The title track’s declaration of love is therefore not metaphorical. It describes a feedback system.

The duo’s background helps explain why this feedback feels both musical and confrontational. Nordwall has spent decades moving among noise, drone, experimental electronics, improvisation and label curation through iDEAL Recordings. Rylander came through the physical attack of Union Carbide Productions, conceptual sound art, percussion and image-making. The Skull Defekts gave them a shared laboratory for repetitive rock, but Saturn and the Sun eliminates the buffer of a full group. Their exchange becomes starker. One action introduces pressure; the other recognizes how long it should remain.

The influence of 1960s minimalism is audible not through academic refinement but through faith in recurrence. Early techno contributes the conviction that machine rhythm can reorganize bodily time. Ritual music contributes the understanding that repetition is social and psychological before it is decorative. Noise supplies damaged texture and uncertainty. None of these elements is quoted cleanly. They have been heated together until their historical labels begin melting away.

This makes In Love With the Extreme feel simultaneously primitive and technological. Its rhythms suggest drums without needing drums; its electronic tones suggest fire, metal and weather without imitating any of them. The machines are contemporary, but the behavior being pursued is ancient: gather around a recurring pulse, surrender ordinary time and allow vibration to change the group’s internal state.

There is no obvious group present on the recording, only two operators and an imagined listener. Yet the record remains intensely communal because rhythm presumes another body capable of receiving it. Even heard alone, the tracks construct a social space. The kick drum becomes a signal sent through the floor. Distortion fills the air shared by speaker and listener. The album does not ask whether the listener wishes to participate. Hearing is participation.

The original white vinyl provides a striking physical contradiction. White suggests blankness, cleanliness and neutrality, while the music is stained, heavy and almost tar-like. The limited hand-numbered edition also turns a mass-produced format into an individually marked object. Each copy belongs to the same sequence but carries a different number, just as each repetition within the music belongs to one pattern while arriving inside slightly altered conditions.

In Love With the Extreme is concise enough to avoid exhausting its method. Four tracks, two per side, create a complete progression from hidden pulse to ritual gravity, boundary crossing and the final recognition that pleasure may simply be pressure interrupted. The album does not attempt to display every possibility within the duo’s equipment. It establishes one severe environment and studies how several forms of repetition behave inside it.

Its extremity lies less in loudness than commitment. Nordwall and Rylander remain with sounds long after more conventional composition would have introduced contrast, resolution or emotional explanation. They trust recurrence enough to let it expose the listener’s impatience, physical response and changing threshold of perception. The music does not travel toward transcendence. It drills downward until transcendence and compulsion become difficult to distinguish.

By the end, the crouching figure on the cover appears less trapped than occupied. The branches, cables and dark clothing form one temporary nervous system. Saturn continues its immense rotation; the Sun continues producing intolerable light; the beat remains buried beneath the surface. Pleasure arrives when the pressure shifts, then disappears as the system begins another orbit.