The New Black Vinyl, CD & Tape 3 Items

Roll The Dice’s Malcolm Pardon makes a rare solo appearance with a long awaited debut album of solemn keys, with his regular collaborator Peder Mannerfelt providing co-production alongside Aasthma bandmate Pär Grindvik. Evidently the more brooding half of Roll The Dice, judging by the air of ‘Hello Death’, Pardon carries over that project’s wistfulness and cinematic qualities to his solo work in eight minimalist works subtly adorned and rendered with atmospheric synth ornamentation by his fellow Swedish collaborators. The results could be called ambient neo-classical for home listening, but is elevated by its synthy input and a tangible kosmiche yearn, opening out immersive space between Pardon’s gently rolling keys and the complementary arps and pads that flesh out the music’s firmament, ultimately casting a sort of lonely, earthly sound that longs for the heavens. It’s almost solo piano, but Pardon’s skeletal loops are augmented with subtle, atmospheric electronic elements from Mannerfelt and Grindvik that imbue proceedings with an almost an Eno-esque quality, echoing the tapey, hypnotic minimalism of “Thursday Afternoon” or the delicate cosmic throb of “Cluster & Eno”. We’ve been subject to far too much solo piano tinkling over the last few years, but “Hello Death” avoids the usual pitfalls. It’s never too pretty or too obvious, avoiding excess and basking in silvery, widescreen subtlety. There’s beauty to be found here, but it’s encased in psychedelic reverberation and woozy, tape-dubbed electronix.

Peder Mannerfelt and soundtrack composer Malcolm Pardon reprise their acclaimed cinematic duo, Roll The Dice for a 4th album of moving, widescreen electro-acoustic sound design, ambient and rhythmic noise themes. Huge recommendation if you're into Peder's solo material or indeed Colin Stetson, The Haxan Cloak, John Carpenter, Deathprod, Willie Burns...

It's an intensely physical yet starkly spacious suite of stone cut electronics and frozen instrumental timbres that in the space of ten sensually riveting and often punishing tracks wrest a poignant, timely sense of emotion from oblique, shadowy structures and burning tonal textures.

Issued on the duo’s newly minted label, The New Black, and incorporating the vital input of Per ‘Ruskträsk’ Johansson’s beastly saxophone animations, the results pursue Roll The Dice’s two soundtrack contributions - for the Blanck Mass-curated score to Belgian horror movie The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears [2013], and their score/end credits for The Last Panthers - into more visceral psychoacoustic space where there’s scant chance of escaping their gloaming tonal apparitions and tensile, bony percussions.

The set is less a mannered symphony, like Until Silence, and more an urgent, angry clash of duelling jazz noise cyborgs, rendering their sound in sharply angular, convulsive spasms of vacuum-packed wind, wood-on-skin, and black cloud palls whose semi-organic nature is belied by the dry punch of air-tight studio production. The results are more pummelling and angered than anyone has previously heard in their music, forging a much harder nosed, anxious aesthetic whose intent resonates with contemporary political pressures.

In between the muzzled grind and bark of album opener The Derailed and the depressive grip of it’s closing statement, Broken In Time, Mannerfelt and Pardon’s dissected instrumentation is tweaked to aching levels of tension, sometimes a sublime tension as with the wilting keys and weightless bass jabs that support Under The Arches and The Kronos Quartet-like pits of Coffin & Nails, or equally with a death-drive fury in the condensed Faust-meets-Tony Conrad impact of Cannonball, the nerve-biting burnout of Bright Lights, Dark Hearts, and yoked tight into Locked Hands’ breathless escalation of arid white noise and thorny pulse.

By straying from the lighter sensual relief conveyed in their earlier releases, Born To Ruin manifests Roll The Dice’s riskiest but arguably most successful move in ten years of producing together, one which pays off with deeply bittersweet appeal though intimate investment and focussed reception.

Performing in the panoramic splendour of Capela Imaculada do Seminário Menor, Braga, Pardon
spellbinds the attendant audience, and now you at home, across nearly an hour of plangent keys
and synths that elegantly reverberate the space’s stone walls in arcing spirals with a fine grasp of
sublime tension and resolution.
Replete with the sound of audience appreciation in classic live album fashion, the performance
begins with the gentle lift of ‘Beneath the Surface’, with simple piano phrasing buoyed by a bed of
choral loops and strings, and the placid ‘Unsettled Beginnings’ leads to a centrepiece of gloaming
Nordic tension with ‘Blood in the water’ resembling Scandi noir soundtrack taken to further, icier
degrees. The tension resolves with the soothing pastoral wist of ‘April 13th’ appearing like some
spectral reflection on AFX’s ‘Avril 14th’, and ’Silent Rumble’ underscores his melancholic train of
piano thought with a rolling bass menace recalling The Necks via John Carpenter