We reviewed Jörgen Gustafsson’s album ‘A Darkened Harbour’ early in 2024, or more correctly the sample track ‘Disperse’.
Jörgen then cited hymns and sacred music among his inspiration for that album and that too seems to be the case with this most recent one, ‘All is in questions’ as he asserts that they were again the inspiration for it and that the reasons are both musical and experiential.
“For example” he says, “I like being in churches, it gives me a sensation like the one being in a forest: a strong emotion in the calm and silence that may be found there. That everything can stop and be completely still for a while. Perhaps connected to being part of something bigger? It relaxes me and puts things into perspective. It may be that one of the goals of my music is to recreate that.”
While I’m not religious I get much the same sensation. I recall it began in the Sacré Coeur Basilica in Paris, many moons ago when I was a regular visitor to the city. More recently music festivals have taken me to a wide range of religious locations including Hauptkirche St Michaelis in Hamburg and Hallgrimskirkja in Reykjavik and these huge white edifices evoke the same effect, one of calm away from the storm, as if the world actually has stopped for a moment and you’ve been allowed to get off, to get your bearings again, especially the moral ones.
Perhaps it is the hushed reverential tones that permeate them that do the trick? It will probably be something different for each individual. They do, as he says, encourage the belief that there is something bigger than us, even if we can’t say for sure what it is.
He portrays ‘All is in questions” as an album which is unpredictable without being inaccessible and in the sample track, ‘Contained and calm’, selected because its title, for me anyway, is most representative of the 10 of the impression he is trying to convey, the ambience flows like a glacial stream, bringing together the spiritual, communal, and practical rhythms of faith, skilfully representing how divine life moves patiently through a community of believers.
Not so much music for airports as for God’s waiting room.
His compatriot, Anna von Hausswolff, is a dab hand at ‘church music’ although her regular assaults on pipe organs don’t always endear her to the authorities. If Jörgencan attach his ambient electronic style to one I’m sure they would be much more accommodating.
(Continues after the Spotify link).
‘All is in questions’, is released by Evergreen Music in conjunction with the Woodbridge Ambient Music Festival in the ambient musician Brian Eno’s hometown in Suffolk, England.
Find him on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jorgen.gustafsson.79
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jorgengustafssonmusic/
Bandcamp: https://jorgengustafsson.bandcamp.com/
