more from
Somewherecold Records
We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Contemporary Guitar Music

by Orange Crate Art

/
  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    Duplicated Compact Disc in Digitpak

    Includes unlimited streaming of Contemporary Guitar Music via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 7 days
    Purchasable with gift card

      $10 USD or more 

     

  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $8 USD  or more

     

1.
Stud Phaser 06:36
2.
3.
4.
5.
Young Spine 13:54
6.
7.

about

"Transducing, transfusing the electric guitar so that this fuzzed-up and flange effected instrument nearly loses itself in the varied states that the Orange Crate Art’s driver Tobias Bernsand sends it, the Contemporary Guitar Music title doesn’t come close to describing the seven musical journeys found within.

Billed as a collection of spontaneous in the moment songs, this latest album from the Malmo explorer traverses a cosmic myriad of trip-hop, post-rock, kosmische, krautrock, psychedelia, dream-pop, indie and baggy dance music; created I’d imagine in some kind of drug-induced haze, with the signature apparatus mind-bended, wailed, contoured and vibrated into a dream factory of the hypnotic, dubby and melting.

Chronicling Bernsand’s creative head space (though this one-man studio enterprise extends to a four-piece when appearing live) in the summer of 2021, there’s a lovely ether oscillating opener entitled ‘Stud Phases’ that reminded me of a dream-wave Land Observations or Broken Shoulder soaked caught in a sort of quasi-electronic dance music cycle. The next track, ‘Wendy Underway’, moves the action towards a trance drifted communion of soft tickling jazz, George Harrison’s Moog mood music, the Van Allen Belt and The Soupdragons: a psychedelic mushroom of translucent cloud gazing if ever I heard one.

A Lydon free PiL has space dust sprinkled on Jah Wobble’s dub bass pulsations on the magical ‘Self-Similarity Fractals’, whilst it could be Weatherall turning on the effects on the velocity building ‘Energetic Superbubble Of Synthetic Telepathy’. Things only get better from here on in, with the epic krautrock peregrination and cosmic courier special ‘Young Spine’, which in equal measures evokes a quasi Klaus Dinger drum beat (not the motorik, but the other kind he specialised in) and echoes of The Untied Knot, Embryo and Higamos Hagamos on its stellar journey – perhaps’ the album’s highlight for me. Just as epic, if probing towards the subterranean is the camel caravan motioned psych bad turn ‘Two Ponies Make No Pint’. A Massive Attack ‘Protection’ style broody bassline is absorbed into a dark patchwork of the HiFi Klub, Andy Haas, Seefeel, Olivia Tremor Control and speaker bouncing arppegiator circling rotations. If you’re aware of the background, the mythology, then you will know that most of the OCA’s material has never been released – that last track being a case in point, a radical ‘remix’ of an unreleased song from four years ago. After a couple of previous attempts and false starts, Bernsand has finally assembled a collection for the highly prolific experimental label Somewherecold (releasing at least four albums a month on average). And it’s an astral belter, a cosmic dream and post-rocking beauty worthy of our attention.

~ Dominic Valvona
monolithcocktail.com/2022/02/07/the-perusal-25-ilmiliekki-quartet-al-doum-and-the-faryds-daisy-glaze-wovenhand/

_________________________

"Nodding to a multitude of aural suggestions varying from ambient, post-rock, shoegaze, kosmische to krautrock, psychedelia, shoegaze, and trip-hop, Orange Crate Art is the one-man recording studio unit by Tobias Bernsand and a four-piece live band based in Malmö, Sweden, active since the mid-Nineties, who has a knack for creating immersive and entrancing sonic journeys enveloped in a warm human glow, mostly based on layered guitars, drums, bass and vocal loops, which can be short and sweet, long and noisy, repetitive and chaotic, fuzzy and blissed-out, seamlessly projecting the semi-hallucinatory state between being asleep and awake into his recordings.

Taken from the upcoming 7-track album, “Contemporary Guitar Music”, scheduled to be released, CD & Digital, on February 18, 2022, through the independent North American label Somewherecold Records, “Stud Phaser” applies the above notion to a trippy video created by Paul Saarnak (of The Beremy Jets), WL//WH is very pleased to premiere.

Right and left hemispheres spark a cosmic light field of far-out ringing, swooshing and purring guitar modulations to swirl whimsically echoing in a never-ending, circular ecstatic dance lead by the steady flow of restrained, clattery percussive rhythms, along with groovy resonant bass pulses and droning hypnogogic auras, invoking latent primal tendencies, sharp blows of enlightenment, and soothing chimes of clarity from a depth defying seemingly electronic awakening of heady sentient pleasantries.

The abstract video shifts shapes and tones in sync with the blissed-out hypnotic frequencies of the soundtrack to project subliminal memories into visual thought forms. Black and sepia-tinged dust clouds, glistening sunburnt rays, and translucent prismatic waves ebb and flow in vibrational frequencies to spawn conceptual cymatic patterns from the sacred geometry of life. Groovy sound visualizations pulse, dance, and align with sonic patterns of metaphysical memories to stimulate mental curiosity, connection, and purpose from the murky waves of psychic stasis."
~ Catherine Gillette
www.whitelight-whiteheat.com/new-music/wl-wh-video-premiere-orange-crate-art-leads-us-into-the-mind-boggling-brilliant-psych-vortex-of-stud-phaser/
____________________________________

"If there’s a tried and tested technique to attracting a certain kind of music fan to your wares, it’s highlighting the obscure nature of an artist. This approach is applicable in many different scenarios. If you are a reissue label, it’s a positive boon if the album you are reissuing had a limited pressing of 50 copies for friends and family back in 1969. If you are trying to impress your mates who reckon they have heard it all, dig out a bootleg of a band who never officially released any music. If you run a label that releases new work from a current artist, point out the lengthy gaps between albums. Bait the hook like this, and you will soon start luring in the obsessives searching, like audio junkies, for their latest hit.

So we understand the tendency toward hyperbole demonstrated by Somewherecold Records on the release of Contemporary Guitar Music. “If you’re aware of the background, the mythology, then you will know that most of [Orange Crate Art]’s material has never been released,” claims the text accompanying the album. Colour us intrigued, certainly – there’s very little work listed under Orange Crate Art on Discogs, so perhaps there is a massive vault of unreleased material amassed over the years. Except there’s over 20 albums on OCA’s own bandcamp page, a mixture of EPs, albums and soundtracks. So unless we’re talking Prince levels of productivity, this all indicates that the mythology mentioned above is just that – a myth.

Still, the hype man did his job, which is why you have a review of Contemporary Guitar Music before you. The title is rather prosaic compared to some of OCA’s other releases that sound like they could have been popular favourites by Tangerine Dream or Yes back in the day, and that is perhaps due to a stylistic shift from his other recent output. Recent Orange Crate Art EPs have leaned into Tobias Bernsand’s fandom of Brian Wilson, which is understandable given his band’s name; before that, there was a scruffier, shoegaze element to his work. This album is closer musically to the latter, and it retains an endearingly chaotic element. As Bernsand plays all the music himself, perhaps he wants to give the impression of a band starting to gel in a live take on the opening “Stud Phaser.”

“Self-Similarity Fractals” captures the essence of Orange Crate Art on this album; a disciplined guitar pattern swirls around over a dubby bass guitar and drums that shift from a tight Seefeel-esque clanking sound to a looser rhythm mid-way through. Strolling along at a tempo Andrew Weatherall used to call ‘drug chug’, Bernsand lightens this taut groove by adding a hint of steel drums over the top. It’s a favourite ploy of producers who also happen to be Beach Boy devotees, and it works a treat. Bernsand is content to let his tracks slowly evolve over their duration, and they take their time doing so – the opening trio of tracks are all nearly seven minutes apiece. But this allows him to occasionally steer the arrangement in a different direction, to let the music play out in much the same way a group jamming together would operate. Quite how one musician captures this spirit, we have no idea but kudos for doing so.

Bernsand has revealed this is his third attempt at recording an album for the Somewherecold label; it didn’t feel right in 2017 and 2019, but everything clicked into place in June 2021. We’re still unsure about the label’s attempts to mythologise Orange Crate Art’s unreleased work, although they had to wait five years for this so it’s perhaps understandable. Certainly, the jury’s still out on the album’s title – it sounds like it should be a record of acoustic folk guitar for some reason – musically, it doesn’t put a foot wrong. Bernsand has created a gauzy hypnotic sound, taut but still loose, that’s perfect for crashing out to on a sunny afternoon. Contemporary Guitar Music should hopefully see Orange Crate Art shake free of the ‘obscure artist’ tag. (Jeremy Bye)"

acloserlisten.com/2022/02/19/orange-crate-art-contemporary-guitar-music/

credits

released February 18, 2022

written, produced, mixed, and mastered by orange crate art at oca studio
contact: orangecrateartsongs@gmail.com
oca central: orangecrateart.bandcamp.com

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Orange Crate Art Skåne County, Sweden

contact / help

Contact Orange Crate Art

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

If you like Orange Crate Art, you may also like: