Kiasmos - // Kiasmos

Released: 05/07/24

Kiasmos, the duo of Bloodgroup's Janus Rasmussen and the renowned film composer Ólafur Arnalds, tend to make unabashedly emotional and beautiful work, and //, the follow-up to the acclaimed 2014 self-titled debut, is no exception. Aptly, for two artists from the Faroe Islands and Iceland, respectively, it is a music that brings to mind panoramic Nordic vistas. The album's compositions are likened to journeys by the two men, and the pair are not wrong, for listening to tracks such as Burst' and Sailed' there is a lovely sense of linear progression in which passages ebb and flow, and motifs rise and fall in various iterations, like objects on the verdant horizon.

Too lively to be trip-hop, and too lush and orchestral to be classed as minimal techno,// is a throwback to late-90s/early-2000s dance music, and reminds me of albums and tracks that I dug in my youth, and still love, such as Björk's Hyperballad', and Talvin Singh's 1998 magnum opusOK “transcendent music of ascension and light; edifying in the way it makes you feel better just by listening to it “ music, to paraphrase the great Emily Dickinson, that perches in the soul.