I can’t deny I’m pretty pleased with the huge range of Nordic Albums and EP’s covered this year, but I don’t think I‘ve written about anything quite like ‘Ingrid’, the new EP from Marko Nyberg.
To start I have to go back 20 years and beyond, when Nyberg founded the excellent Husky Rescue, releasing albums over 10 years and performing across Europe, including Glastonbury festival. But simultaneous to that Nyberg had already established himself as a composer, with his music featuring on TV shows, advertisements and more latterly in films. This has now built into a sizeable catalogue of work.
His new solo project apparently “is born out of the profoundly life changing experiences of a near death experience, and the loss of a father”. In doing so he fuses together techno, neo-classical and minimalist influences to create something all together different and quite powerful too.
Straight from opening track ‘Drift’ Nyberg creates tension, with stuttering synths, haunting musical phrases and a disturbance in the atmosphere, before ending with a section of apparent solitude. ‘Dark Echoes’ opens as if he’s sending a dark Mordor style army marching towards us, before gentle vocals cut through through the mist and offer an alternative explanation.
But ‘Ingrid’ has a somewhat different, a simple but beautiful piano theme, the strings adding a different texture, melancholy of course, but as if they’re playing in reverence to something or someone. ‘Ljusdal’ is absorbing, minimalist in its approach and with the most subtle of musical phrases floating in and out, whilst he ends with ‘Our Land’, noisy, disturbed, as if he’s bringing us back to the reality of modern life.
I don’t know precisely what inspired each of the tracks and maybe that’s why this EP is so successful for me, because it conjures up so many images, poses so many questions, and implores me as listener to find the answers to everything that I’m hearing. At times it is almost overwhelming, yet there is beauty there too, and it demands multiple listens to fully appreciate.
It’s a stunning and very different composition to anything I’ve heard recently.