The album cover celebrates the vastness of nature, with a dramatic Davide Caspar Friedrich style painting of a mountain scene.
In marked contrast, the video to Jeg Velger Deg ('I Choose You') is a grainy home made collage of mostly urban images. We see break dancers, Japanese children in a park and dogs in water; there's no obvious theme or storyline.
Perhaps repetition is the one constant but this does not appear to be a comment on the deadening dullness of routine. Rather these scenes are shot seemingly at random like a visual diary.
The music is similarly elusive and impulsive. There's a spiky hip hop vibe to it but most of the tracks are like Jeg Velger Deg, instrumentals comprised of intricate cut and paste layers.
Kritian Torkelsen from Norway recorded the 8 tracks on this album in a basement studio in Torsnes after which they were remixed in Oslo with Kenneth Ishak. The album follows on from his eponymous debut album from 2012.
One track is called Borge Progjazz which suggests that the patient synthesis of sound has its roots in improvised jazz. But, then again, it closes with the relatively conventional electro-pop of The Exit, a tune with vocals and a clearly defined song structure.
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Megalodon is, as the title implies, a bigger, more imposing sound while Tor Kel Sen has a more playfully disjointed quality and Vagt Minne ('vague memory') has all the manic energy of an arcade game.
The album's unpredictability is it's major strength.
Throughout, it is the contrasting elements that draw you in, deliberately sabotaging any sense of uniformity.
Torkelsen's website
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