This is the debut release from the Norwegian duo of Espen Friberg and Jenny Berger Myhre. The pair previously worked together during the recording of Friberg’s solo debut Sun Soon (Hubro, 2022), as Berger Myhre helped out with production and arrangements. During those sessions, the pair discovered that they shared a “playful, intentionally naive approach towards making art” and Flutter Ridder was born.
Notably, that willfully naive approach mirrors that of some of Sweden’s more compelling underground luminaries (Enhet För Fri Musik, Blod, Arv & Miljö), but Flutter Ridder are quite different stylistically from their more noise-adjacent neighbors. Part of that divergence is certainly due to the duo’s unusual instrumentation (Friberg plays a Serge modular synth, Berger Myhre plays a pipe organ), but their approach to composition is quite unique as well. In fact, the album was deliberately recorded in an ancient wooden church to make the most of the duo's love of natural acoustic reverb and their belief that air and electricity share a common flow. In short, Flutter Ridder embrace an unhurried and unprocessed rustic simplicity, but find some room in their hearts for a modular synth as well.
Given the varied and inventive ways that Friberg and Berger Myhre interact throughout the album, it is quite a challenge to find a piece that can reasonably be described as “representative,” but the beautiful opener “Below A Layer Bend Aside” does capture the duo’s vision at its most elegantly distilled. At its heart, it is just a simple, gently oscillating organ drone, but the oscillations and harmonies gradually become increasingly complex until they conjure a ghostly haze of overtones.
The album’s centerpiece “Barely Dragging Whole Apart” is considerably more melodic, however, as a gorgeously wistful organ motif dreamily evokes something best described as “a bittersweet love theme for a gently hallucinatory carnival.” It is an absolutely sublime piece of music from start to finish, but it also transcends mere beauty through an inspired host of cool and unpredictable harmonies, hesitations, stumbles, and textures.
Amusingly, the album’s other highlight could not possibly be more different (given the limited palette involved), as “Woods Wiggle Rising Skies” sounds like a gently trippy and futuristic synth motif emerging from numbers station-style radio chatter, then adds some very unexpected dub-techno-esque bass and percussion elements to the mix before even more unexpectedly resolving into a coda of lush pipe organ chords.
The all-too-brief closer “All That’s Left Already Here” is a gorgeous (if modest) pleasure as well, as a melody that sounds like an enchanted music box emerges from a bed of warm drone before quickly disappearing once more into a dreamy fade out. That makes for an appropriately lovely ending to a charming and quietly lovely album. While a few more substantial melodic pieces in the vein of “Barely Dragging Whole Apart” would admittedly have been welcome, the simple, minimalist pleasures of the remaining pieces still manage to cumulatively cast quite a pleasantly unique and absorbing spell in their own right.
Listen here.
