Tsembla, or Marja Johansson, presents a bizarre and affecting collection of experimental works on Nouskaa Henget that continue and expand upon the world of her previous full-length effort, 2011’s Fauna. But where both albums favor lush arrangements of warped field recordings, looped samples, and electroacoustic colors, on Nouskaa Henget, Johansson offers a work more careful and measured. This isn’t a criticism — in fact, the effect it has is contrary to the expected, for as Johansson spaces her elements more effectively around the album, it gives the entire record a more varied tangent, as the sparser sections dependent on warped flutes recorded in the Andes (“Vasen Käsi, Kolmas Ovi,” “Vuoren Huipulle”) are able to sit in greater contrast with sections that are imbued…
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…with the greater intricacies evident on Fauna (“Viikunakatedraali,” “Nouskaa Henget!”). This is a welcome and necessary departure, due in equal parts to Johansson’s instrumental combinations and her somewhat skewed-from-the-norm compositional approach.
Yet, despite this degree of abstraction presented throughout the record, Johansson arranges her collages in ways that mirror traditional pieces or songs, and in essence, relatively untoward or abstract, they’re really tapping into a crucial driving point in artistic expression, something that weeds out those not willing to sacrifice the comfort of banality.
Nouskaa Henget is a song cycle, albeit a complicated one. What differentiates the “songs” from the norm (apart from obvious form and harmonic signals) is an attention to textural interplay — the collected pieces are logical and follow established intuitive patterns, but the elements forming these singularities are more complex, requiring several listens to unpack the compacted jumble of hissing flutes, hand drums, and distorted time-based effects of the album.
While it’s evident that Tsembla’s creations are occasionally difficult to coherently come to grips with, that’s part of the experience — the record doesn’t hold back in its expression of the outré, but once it breaches the threshold of what one perceives to be normality, it reveals Tsembla to be not too dissimilar from a marked number of contemporaries. This doesn’t diminish from the album’s, nor Johansson’s individuality, and Nouskaa Henget stands as a thoroughly complex and thought-provoking microcosm.
01. Hypoteesi
02. Aivojen Pimeydessä
03. Stjärnan
04. Vasen Käsi, Kolmas Ovi
05. Mitä Me Etsimme?
06. Hirtetty
07. Vuoren Huipulle
08. Viikunakatedraali
09. Dåren
10. Nouskaa Henget!