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Reviews

Gustaf Fjelstrom — Intention
(Bandcamp no#, 2015, LP+CD)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2015-08-10

Intention Cover art

Many will remember ‘Gus’ from his days as the bassist of San Francisco Bay Area instrumental trio Maximum Indifference, where they took the sound palette of classic Hemispheres era Rush and launched it to new heights and beyond with their original compositions across two self-released albums. Some time has passed since those days, and with his first full-length solo album Intention, he has embraced a more liquid floating ambient sound that grooves along in a more spacey mode on the eight tracks presented here. The sound shimmers and echoes in labyrinthine loops, with all instruments (bass and synths mostly) played by Fjelstrom along with drums by Nick Grant or Brad Bjurman (track depending), and although there are no lyrics here, Cathryn Talbert contributes some heavily processed haunting wordless voice parts to the proceedings here and there, most notably on the title cut. The sonics throughout are lush, layered and extremely dense, replete with melodies, rhythm and a lot of feeling, captivating while the album is playing, but for the most part not defined enough to follow the listener away from the experience, which in this case is probably the ‘intention.’ Like a drifty, dreamy and peaceful journey on a pillow of clouds, each piece on Intention is distinct from the one before it, but shares many of the same aesthetics, both in composition and overall production. Intention has been released as an LP, with a CD of the same material included and free downloads.

Filed under: New releases, 2015 releases

Related artist(s): Gustaf Fjelstrom

More info
http://music.botched.com/album/intention

 

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