��Musik For Tomma Rum (or ("Music For Empty Rooms") is the third album from the somewhat mysterious Swedish band Attestupa, who take their name from the steep, craggy mountains in Nordic folklore from which the elderly and the infirm would hurl themselves to their death, in an effort to spare the rest of their community the trouble of having to care for them in their old age. Knowing that piece of folklore is an almost essential aspect of appreciating this bands music, as they perform some of the bleakest, most miserable (and yet often strangely beautiful) music on their records, crafting slow-moving, fuzz-drenched folk dirges that seem to imbue a kind of industrial-tinged slowcore with traces of black metal buzz and an atmosphere of rural isolation and wintry desolation. Made up of members of the dark Swedish noise outfits Sewer Election and Blodvite, this band is definitely not another noise project, but an utterly haunting mix of blackened funereal folk and creepy, crude autumnal noisescapes laid out across long, lumbering low-fi dirges that move in monotonous slow-motion. I first fell under the spell of this group after picking up their 1867 12" a while back (which we finally picked up for the C-Blast shop, check out the review for that elsewhere on this weeks list), but this newest album is even better, utterly dark and doleful music that falls somewhere in between the gurgling electronics of Throbbing Gristle, the obscure 70's necro-psych of German Oak, and the mournful melodies found on Ulver's Bergtatt...
�� The first song "Skingras Och Ers�ttas" lays down a steady monotonous drumbeat beneath a sorrowful rumbling dronescape of distorted keyboards and clanking guitar, a kind of funereal slowcore lament, the keyboards way out in front playing a sad, distorted melody while the faint, plaintive singing drifts across the background. At first this sort of resembles a more low-fi, blown-out Codeine song bathed in Burzumic buzz and threaded with faint frostbitten melancholy, the twangy gutter-blues guitar layered with subtle crackling noise and primitive gurgling electronics. From there, though, the band drifts out into passages of random noise and murky malfunctioning electronics that eventually turn into the fields of minimal ambient drift and mysterious field recordings that make up tracks like "L�sryckta Minnen". The rest of Musik wanders through similar frosty fields of mournful dirge and cracked electronics, the ghostly melody of "Stillast�ende Luft" spilling out over more of those strange field recordings, the sound joined with distant doleful chanting voices and those prominent organ-like keyboard, playing another gorgeously grim melody over the layers of noise and low-fi grit. Elsewhere, those haunted-house organs emerge over murky minor key guitars on songs like "S� G�r Dagen", the sound aglow in grey winter light, leading downward into fields of crackling black noise that, by the end of the side, turn into something that resembles one of The Rita's crumbling noisescapes. On "Tystnad", the band crafts a pure noisescape of crackling, rumbling sound that feels like icy winds rushing across banks of contact mics, until it eventually shifts into one last blown out organ dirge that closes the album. While utilizing elements of electronic noise and extreme distortion, Attestupa's music is really about crafting a beautifully blighted atmosphere out of repetition and texture, a folk-flecked dirge-rock that, while not remotely "metal", has echoes of early Ulver and Burzum in the achingly beautiful doom-laden melodies. Amazing, utterly forlorn music, and a new favorite, for sure.
�� Limited to five hundred copies.