Astralseid
Shamanic Love
(Astral Synergy Productions)
A low roiling synth bass wash seeps under the first few seconds of “Shadow Love,” the opener of Astralseid’s Shamanic Love. Soon into the song, we get wild vocal chanting as the synth scape rises to quite a scary tribal vibe, then the beat takes over. It’s a slow studied entre’ to this 4-song album created by Gustav Holberg, who ‘sings’ here, plays synth, drums, and mouth-harp, and Rúnahild, who also managed vocals and synth.
A twinkling backbeat begins the decidedly lighter-in-tone, next tune, “Skydance.†Yes, the chant-vocalizing returns, but that glockenspiel-like trilling and a snappy snare sound keep this jaunty,’ best they will ever be with what this duo creates. Soon things change up in the trilling as the arpeggio increases in speed, and the trilling dies out altogether as once again things get melancholy with snare, synth, and vocalizing.
“Liberty†opens with yet another low synth bass wash, and by the two-minute mark, things get positively Willian Orbit-like danceable with arpeggiating synths and machine beats.
The last and longest tune, “Awakening,†sounds the most tribal. Gustav Holberg plays acoustic percussion while he and Rúnahild call into the wilderness. They get their danceable snare in my midway, keeping up the central theme throughout, but it’s their vocalizing that makes this one.
Astralseid’s music is created in what is described by their press as an “earthen cabin, situated on an organic mountain-farm in Western Norway,†and these four tracks on Shamanic Love do sound otherworldly and mostly disconnected from popular genre and commercialism. “Tribal Ambient” anyone?
