“I just make stuff until it sounds right,” said Norwegian experimental musician Gaute Granli in a 2021 interview, when asked about his creative intentions. His answer is both evasive—what would it mean, when crafting deliberately confrontational art, to release something you think sounds wrong?—and an accurate description of a practice shaped by enigmatic instincts. Granli’s curious new album Rosacea has a nebulous atmosphere all its own. Bloodshot synth figures and delirious vocal performances are presented at their most elemental, as Granli zeroes in on the intangible forces that can make music tweak your senses and sneak past conscious understanding.
Granli’s favorite tool is the loop, which lets him incorporate any flash of texture—a one-off sampled kick drum, or a foggy patch of effects-laden slowcore guitar—into his ramshackle dream logic, creating pieces that dodge convention, yet follow a sustained, self-imposed structure. As his songs gradually populate their frigid space with instrumental lines, surreal contrasts emerge, as on “Wampir,” with its shaggy, searching bass offset by sickly-sweet wind whistles. Some of these abstractions are more evocative than others. Granli applies his most interesting manipulations to the voice, the instrument most responsive to the symbolic imagination of the edit. On “Tatting Shuttle,” processed vocal fragments—pitchy, synthetic garble a la Paul Lansky; a guttural loop that suggests folkier throat singing—swarm and drown out a “lead vocal” that’s only occasionally identifiable as such. Somehow, Granli’s music preserves an identity as a kind of warped, forward-facing pop, even when all of its boundaries dissolve away.
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Unmoored from tradition and offering only vague, impressionistic lyrics, Granli’s quavering performances on Rosacea become Rorschach tests, ripe for free association with whatever images your psyche can dredge up. The album’s Bandcamp blurb shouts out Ghédalia Tarzatès, the late French composer who collaged his wails and lamentations in the endangered Ladino language to evoke pangs of existential angst. A friend with more of an indie-rock background said Rosacea sounds like Stephen Merritt in the Black Lodge. I’m sometimes reminded of the priest at the stately Catholic church where I grew up, who tried to lead me through the murk of my now-lapsed faith with thin, singsongy Latin cadences that seemed slight compared to the divine communion they were seeking. If unclassifiable DIY albums like Rosacea are often described in spiritual or religious terms—mystifying words like “incantations” or “rituals”—perhaps that’s because places of worship are where many of us first witness people who lack professionalized musical training bending context-specific forms to their will for a captive audience.
Although the album finds its power in moments of charged, unresolved tension, many choices are straightforwardly pleasurable. The consonant choral harmonies on “Rosacea” lack some of the queasiness of other tracks, and the warm, burbly guitar tone on “The Greatest Opponent” could’ve been isolated from a ’70s jazz fusion album. But even these are a little uncanny. As with the output of Scandinavian labels like Gothenburg’s Discreet Music, I detect a particular, inscrutable personality in Granli’s work; he’ll indulge in spontaneous reverie, but maintain a deadpan pose that reminds you of the artifice inherent in the creative process. He comes off as an eccentric record collector, intrigued by the idioms of the 20th-century avant-garde, global folk, and private-press pop alike—someone who appreciates when composition and happenstance conspire to make a musician not just play on or produce their records, but inhabit them, like some incorporeal being lurking behind every waveform, frozen in time. On his own album, Granli inhabits each song with an arcane spirit, careful to never derail his fragile mystery.
