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Reviews

Erik Wøllo — Gateway (2025 Remaster)
(Projekt 433, 2010/2025, 2CD)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2025-08-10

Gateway (2025 Remaster) Cover art

For over forty years and around 55 full length releases, Norwegian composer Erik Wøllo has been exploring the gentler and more melodic voice of the electric guitar and all of its wondrous possibilities. Of late he has delivered roughly an album a year, give or take, but in this review we are going back to the year 2010 and his album Gateway, which has just been remastered and re-released with an additional disc of heretofore unreleased music in a similar style from the same time period. For the previous ten years or so, Wøllo had been releasing his music in the United States on the Spotted Peccary label, and some excellent albums are to be found therein, like Guitar Nova, Wind Journey, Blue Sky, Red Guitars, and others. With Gateway, Wøllo released his first full length recording on the Projekt label — a move that was seemingly inevitable at the time — with numerous releases to follow in all the years since. I don’t think Wøllo’s style of producing music changed at that point; if it did, it happened too incrementally to be noticed, but it seems in retrospect this is where his music belonged, a tragectory that began in the jazz world and evolved slowly over a long period of time to encompass his unique vision as a composer and player. Fortunately for myself, Gateway was a missing page in my Wøllo experience, having followed him from the beginning through his Origo Sound period onward to Spotted Pec, but missed this one and a couple more that followed after moving to Projekt — I believe Timelines was the first in 2014, but things tend to change at a glacial pace in Wøllo’s world, and anyone familiar with recent albums like Solastalgia and Where the River Widens will be right at home with this Gateway remaster, or any of the eight tracks on the accompanying bonus disc. The pace is gentle but intentional, the melodies beautiful and direct, the production is at once dreamy and majestic. Tracks like “Thule,” “The Crossing,” “Wetlands,” and the title track feature all of the serenity and revelatory imagery that one comes to expect from this composer. The additional cuts tend to be a little more active and electronic, but no less engaging, standouts being “Time Fracture,” “Peaceful Mind,” and the ten-minute “Vandring,” but honestly there isn’t a dud to be found here anywhere. This is a most welcome reissue.

Filed under: Reissues, 2025 releases, 2010 recordings

Related artist(s): Erik Wøllo

More info
http://projektrecords.bandcamp.com/album/gateway-2025-remaster

 

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