High-concept albums usually focus on the novelty of the inputs, while the resulting music takes a back seat. This unsatisfying paradigm means that the critical aspect of the listening experience, the music, is often unrewarding regardless of what went into making it. Rarely does an album manage to cross the high-wire act of its own pretensions to exercise the necessary academic and emotional muscles.
Jacob Kirkegaard’s fifth album, Four Rooms, balances on this pin head, producing a resonantly haunting meditation on the silence of dislocation. Twenty years after the Chernobyl accident, Kirkegaard set out to record the sound of silence in four abandoned rooms; he deliberately picked rooms which used to be active meeting places: a church, an auditorium, a gymnasium and a swimming pool.
While the recordings have a definitive scientific bent, as Kirkegaard specifically searches for the sound of radioactive pollution, the music is also stained by the ghostly presence of what was, and is no longer there. Each room was recorded for ten minutes and then the recordings were played back into the room, while being recorded again.
The result is four distinct drone pieces, full of surprisingly different tonal structures, which reflect the forgotten spirit of these once-living spaces. Where ‘Church’ is filled with a menacingly thick hum that gets heavier as the recording progresses, “Swimming Pool” bubbles innocuously and “Gymnasium” works sinuous wavelengths that shimmer like new stainless steel.
With or without back-story, Four Rooms, brims with stark resilient beauty. The breadth of Kirkegaard’s recordings stands tall on their own, but is endlessly enriched by its harrowing inspiration.
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