Aery (Sweden) Closing Skies (remix) – single/possible future album track

Those that have been reading me for long enough will know that I am not a great fan of remixes. In 10 years of doing this I’ve heard no more than a handful that have done justice to the original and only one that actually improved on it. (A song by the currently inactive Swedish artist Ida Long if you’re interested).

And so it is, I’m sad to say, with this remix of Aery’s ‘Closing Skies’ by Kryptofarmaka, an artist name of Anton Sundell, who has worked with Tonbruket, Ane Brun and Sara Parkman, which actually sets quite a high bar.

To be honest I’m not really keen on that moniker either. It sounds like the nickname of a Wall Street Trader, a ‘Master of the Universe’ if you’ve read Bonfire of the Vanities (which you should).

Aery is a collaboration between Mi von Ahn and Joel Gabrielsson, indie/alt electronic specialists with a love for soundscapes and who are unusual in that they rarely meet, being two successful musicians in their own right but one lives in the north of Sweden and the other in the south; and that can be tricky in that elongated country.

So what they come up with is often a compromise between their artistic outlooks, drawing influences from trip-hop, ambient, and acoustic minimalism too, in an attempt to merge two different artistic worlds into something that belongs only to them.

‘Closing Skies’, which is a song about change, war, and alienation, was first released as a single at the end of last year, not all that long ago, and was inspired by news footage from Ukraine and an accompanying sense of isolation.

Essentially it is a gentle piano ballad, the sort of thing that could be played over aerial news footage in a sombre documentary about what is left of Kharkiv and Mariupol.

What Kryptofarmaka has done, after the opening bars that remain from the first iteration, is to drag it kicking and screaming to the front line, somewhere in the Donbas, where a succession of machine gun fire and drone explosions compete with the music and there’s only one winner in that contest.

Not only that, he’s added an extra two minutes to it, which is the equivalent of 20 minutes injury time over the 90 to a football team that is already losing 10-0.

And it sounds like the piano was playing in a studio across the corridor while the percussion is freeform jazz.

Then the electronic tinkering and trap beats come in and…oh dear.

To be fair it does improve in the sections in which Mi is singing and can actually be heard – and for that very reason, as she goes more ethereal than she was on the original.

But sorry, that’s really the only positive comment I can make.

That first version though is quite beautiful. And that is why you get both versions here.

I pass them onto you and your thoughts.

In autumn the mini-album ‘Nowhere Stranger’ will be released, with live shows in Sweden planned around the launch – and with hopes of taking their music beyond Sweden’s borders in the future. I hope that means we might see them in the UK before long.

Find them on:

(We have no socials for Aery yet, they will be posted if and when we find them!)

Mi von Ahn:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mivonahn