Testbild!, Imagine a House

by dave heaton

"This record has been supported by the Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs" – I always love seeing a disclaimer like that on some weird little indie-label CD. Government support for "Friendly Noise" (as the label is called) – must be nice.

Friendly indeed this music is, and also delightfully weird in that hazy, lost-in-a-sunbeam way. The dream life is what these gently psychedelic, synth-heavy but nature-evoking, old-world folk songs bring to mind. The first track takes us "Inside Raindrops" – in a 1970s public-television-meets lonesome-eccentric-tripping-on-his-front-porch-in-the-rain sort of way: "lilac crystals / subatomic salt / floating inside raindrops." The songs that follow maintain that interest in what's going on inside, beyond the surface, and get increasingly mysterious about it – the music slowing, hovering, spreading out, spacing out, and disappearing in ways that amplify the philosophical and supernatural nature of the lyrics (to the songs that have lyrics – about half). They together form an epic sort of exploration of interior state of being, the lyrics intriguing and the music exciting for its meandering, questioning nature. Though it sounds like a dreamer's paradise, there's a genuine darkness here too, as there are in dreams: a reminder of the ways the horrors of real life manifest themselves in dreams. The final lyric on the album: "dreamt of houses in cities / lost by earthquake rumbling / pictured all the houses and lies.".

{www.testbild.org}