Music on the Touch label is often fixated with environmental matters – not in the Al Gore solar panel powered TV standby button sense, but in the sense of their regard for the music which exists in or is created by the environment (note their forthcoming Atmospheres event at the lovely Museum of Garden History).  Hence while this latest release is billed as a duo record featuring Lasse Marhaug on electronics and Nils Henrik Asheim on organ, the contribution of a third body is as important: the Oslo church in which this was recorded.

An engineer friend was talking to me about the complexity of installing a church organ.  Admittedly, a lot of stuff went over my head, all about load bearing and so on, but I did get the impression of the serious enmeshment of organ and building.  This concept is key to the success of Grand Mutation, in which the embranglement of all the three elements becomes absolute – the organ notes are swallowed up by the resonance of the room, which merges with Marhaug’s electronic waves, drones and feedback.  While I was occasionally reminded of the interlocked Sten/Storlokken axis at Supersilent (re-interpreting some Bach, perhaps) the terrifying quasi-religious feeling induced by the likes of “Bordunal” is akin to that I get listening to Ligeti at his most serious.  I obtained idiosyncratic light relief during the moments when the constituent parts were fractured by the punishing organ at the end of “Phoneuma”, and on into the brief “Magnaton” – my mind inexplicably entertaining the Simpsons scene where Bart replaces the organist’s sheet music with Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”.

Explore the colossal spaces of Grand Mutation for yourself with purchase from the Touch shop.