“Looking to invoke how we experience the past, where the amorphous drift comes to form strange patterns and meanings.” That’s how we described ‘Tiden far’, the recent single from Sweden‘s Old Amica. A single “suitably hazy and slow-moving, its drama arising from a concealed hand as though always masked by something,” as we put it. “Familiar sights and sensations as experienced through a gauze curtain. Old voices coming through a crackling radio, messages moving through the accumulated years with something to offer us yet.”
The single offered the first taste of new full-length album För alltid, a record which explores time with Old Amica’s signature care and patience. The songs follow ‘Tiden Far’ in their elusiveness, suspended in a negative space seemingly disconnected from anything tangible, memories floating by in abstract grace. Opener ‘Vågorna på Arcus’ sets the tone, an ambient track with a sense of distance, not to mention a balance between intimacy and heft. Another juxtaposition informs ‘Klorofyll’, its layers of field recordings seeing birdsong and something altogether more electronic meet within a wistful soundscape. Another dispatch from the past where memories of the organic peek through a digital medium.
Described by the artist as a “homage to an old friend slowly floating away from us, on a wooden raft under the starlit sky,” ‘Mot natten’ sees Old Amica maintain the ambient style while leaning someway back towards the folk end of the spectrum. A song almost Sigur Rós-esque in its gathering tones and landing somewhere adjacent to Radical Face with the fondness of the hummed vocals. The result possesses an almost ritualistic tone, a kind of funeral procession for the cherished individual to shepherd them towards whatever waits on the other side.
This same blend of melancholy and wonder runs through the length of För alltid. Be it the shining ‘Gammalt ljus’ or shadowed ‘Neckar’, the plaintive simmer of ‘Till dig’. A distinctly human sound rising through accumulated time and distorted static, something represented almost literally in ‘Sommaren 96’. It’s a song which energes through snowy fuzz without quite conquering it, ever-haunted by snatches of analogue transmissions whose meaning has long since disintegrated. But emerge the song does, a fact which seems intrinsic to the album as a whole. The universe is a lonely place, and time only makes the chasm deeper. Yet somehow we endeavour to reach across the void, even if it is only in small gestures of sound.
För alltid is out now and available from the Old Amica Bandcamp page.