The band Avgrunden recently released their second album, or LP, like they prefer to call it; it was primarily released on a good old cassette tape through Ominous Recordings (sold out at the moment).
The name of the album is “The Cursed Earth”, and like the name implies the music is rather dark, or at least with a strong mellow ambience. Drone music the genre is called, though the title track is referred to as doom country. It’s about instrumental, slow music, where the closest music I can refer to is ambient music, but here the instrument setup is based on guitars, drums, strings, and percussion.
The ambience reminds of a barren, desolate landscape with a heavy, fateful atmosphere. In a song like “Crazy Horse Redress” I’m looking at american deserts, but overall the feeling I get from the music is a strong nordic melancholy.
Victor Granat, who started the band, explains that the band’s name Avgrunden (The Abyss) is partly based on the quote from Nietsche: “If you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss will in the end stare back at you” (my translation). In the beginnning (2 years before the band was formed and the concept consisted of just Victor and two guitars) he could play a guitar riff for 15 minutes and that was it. The idea was that if you repeat something enough it will change it’s shape and appearance, Victor says and continues:
I also get the feeling that Sweden is kind of “The end of the world” or at least “The end of the western world” (according to many). There is a melancholy within Swedish culture that I, personally, love and it’s the same melancholy you would expect if you were standing on the edge of the end of the world, staring into the infinite abyss.
Th music is supposed to picture that border land at the end of the world, it’s music that hopefully will take the listener on a journey through musical landscapes on the edge of the abyss.
You can find Avgrunden on their site or on Facebook and you can listen to more music on their Soundcloud page.
The Cursed Earth
