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The choice ofboth title and design for Nilsen's debut full-length (under his ownname) might not be coincidence; white, as a symbol of blankness orabsence, seems the color most appropriate for the artist's recent workfollowing years of recording as Hazard. Past Hazard releases, withnames like Wind and Land,used a process in which environmental field recordings were transformedand obscured via computer and the addition of manufactured acoustictextures to create droning monoliths of hazy, indistinct but naturalsound. Nilsen's relationship with nature has always been one of vagueintent, his Hazard music forever avoiding the accessibility suggestedby a "field-recorded" music. Fade to White, though, sounds likea conscious attempt to carry these sounds, however humble in origin,past the elemental abstractions suggested in previous titles and into atemporal realm of commonality and decay. Never have Nilsen's sourcesbeen more heavily obscured, though never have his compositions soundedso simply or weightlessly constructed. Perhaps taking inspiration fromNilsen's new-found love of the pipe organ, as documented on Spireand his prior live CDR, these six lengthy tracks are complex withoutbeing complicated, massive droning structures without weight ordensity, captured on the brink of a final dissolution. It's as if theinsect frenzy, blizzard winds and hollow industrial spaces of previousreleases are replaced now with echoes of an earthly movement, vestalremnants of the natural sublime reduced to its most basic melodic ortextural parts. This music has an inertia separate from anythingsuggested by the naturalism of sounds or even rhythmic loops placed ontop. Obscured textures move things in a perpetual fade-out doubling asperpetual saturation; I'm reminded of Bergman movies told in segmentsthat overflow with light in perfect and anxious timing. I get theimpression, based also on his recent collaboration with theunclassifiable Stilluppsteypa, that Nilsen has entered a new phase inhis art, combining an exhausted reverence for natural phenomena with aninterest in values that transcend or speak-through the natural world.Titles like "Grappa Polar," or the title of the new collaboration Vikinga Brennivin(ahallucinogenic Nordic liquor) indicate that altered states or thejourney inside may now have eclipsed previous interest in theinvestigation of the surrounding world. Nilsen's Fade to Whiteis a blindfold, a scraping clean of the canvas to discover which imagesare lost, which remain, and which are transformed.
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