Splashgirl: Field Day Rituals

This Scandinavian trio recorded its fourth album in Seattle, WA featuring resident violaist Eyvind Kang and synth performer Timothy Mason lending their wares during various segments. An atmospheric engagement projecting a sense of antiquity, it's often what the musicians don't play that establishes the premise for the artful and rather haunting song-forms executed throughout their cunning playbook. Nestled within slow to moderate pulses, veiled with dark ambient characteristics and judicious use of electronics, the band renders a syndicate of otherworldly tone poems.

The opening track, "Long Story," is a forbearer of what follows on the remainder of the album. Containing Andreas Stensland Lowe's hallowed and electronically treated piano phrasings, the music surges forward like an ethereal dirge, strategically supported by drummer Andreas Lonmo Knudsrod's supple brushwork and accenting cymbal hits. With reverberating effects rounding out ghostly perimeters, this piece vividly casts notions of dour circumstances and tethers simple chord voicings and an elongated melody. Ominous implications transcend the norm as the trio's signature style and idiosyncratic compositional mindset equates to an unclassifiable muse that sets them miles apart from the status quo.