Nils Petter Molvaer: Streamer

On "Little Indian I found my attention wandering pretty quickly, not least because this music seems unable to amount to anything more than the sum total of its influences. Weighted down by its apparent awe of antecedents, the results come across as featherweight, especially when Molvaer's debt to the likes of Massive Attack is apparent, but his group signally fails to match that outfit's grasp of dynamics.

"Sauna amounts to a whole lot of nothing, though producing music so devoid of feeling might actually mark some kind of achievement in itself. Makers of wildlife documentary films might find it a rich source of incidental music, but it still comes to pretty thin musical gruel.

DJ Strangefruit is formally credited with "vinyl abuse" here, but if anything, "vinyl reverence" might be a more apt term. He certainly does nothing to ruffle the surface of "Solid Ether, where the audience noise before the performance seems a lot more animated than the music itself. As a general point, the politeness that infuses this programme does it no favours at all as a listening experience, especially on "Kakonita, which sounds like a sedated Jan Garbarek.

One of the defining characteristics of the whole electronica movement has arguably been its accelerated rate of development. If indeed that is the case, then Molvaer occupies some indifferent generic space that is far from stimulating. Streamer is all pretty tiresome, really, in the end.

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