LUGOLA - DEFORM (LIVE AT XX WROCŁAW INDUSTRIAL FESTIVAL) (CD by Zoharum)
Erik Jarl has been active for quite some time already. The first time I was introduced to the inside of his head was when he was still an active member of Skin Area. Calculating back, that must have been the first half of the '00s. Around that time, he also started releasing his solo works, and several of those early works seem to form the base of my Jarl collection. Unfortunately, there is a gap in the middle, so for me, "Mind Rotation" is a renewal of some sort. The CD has five pieces and about an hour of compositions. It's also available on cassette, which is a fun gimmick but having said that, I prefer this to be on CD because of the sound quality.
The five pieces are entitled "Mind Variation", "Mind Dimension", "Mind Symptoms", "Mind Isolation", and "Mind Disorder". And reading those, My suspicion is - as we've seen more often from kindred musical minds - that the album is a journey through emotions of states of the human mind. And that those states of emotions are not always comfortable ones. The promotional sheet that came with the CD agrees with me there, so yeah, that part is already well done by Jarl.
So, where does the album stand music-wise? Because I have only the old releases to compare it to, I must say the chosen palette of sounds is much clearer and more synthetic than Jarl's earlier work. Pads, arpeggiators and a very definitely compositional background elevate this release towards compositions in contradiction to his really early works that I would call sound-based entities. Please note that it's not a validation of them; there is absolutely nothing wrong with either of them. But instead of getting drowned in a specific sound, here you are drowning in the hypnotic layers of the composition. The final and longest track of "Mind Rotation" still has a bit of both, and maybe that is because I like that one the best. It combines the wisdom and knowledge Jarl gained over the years, yet still has that 'early years' vibe where he was searching for the language he wanted to speak to share the insides of his mind.
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