By Didrik Søderlind
Dark ambient music might not be a prime Norwegian export yet, but with the debut release The Silver Hour the band Swarms have established themselves at the top of the genre. Knokkelklang have used the Internet to talk with Swarms mastermind Kim Sølve.
Apart from black metal, Norway has never really been a hotbed of “dark” music. This seems to be slowly, but surely changing, as young musicians – often with a background in metal – start to explore other ways of making dark music.One of the most promising signs of this trend is the dark-ambient act Swarms, (http://www.myspace.com/swarmsinside) who recently released their debut album The Silver Hour (Vendlus Records).
While consisting of a small coterie of contributing members, it’s pretty easy to figure out that the driving force behind the constellation is a young gentleman known as Kim Sølve (who prefers not to use his last name).
A man of many talents, Kim Sølve is so far best known as a gifted designer. He is the “Kim” part of Trine og Kim Design Studio (http://www.trineogkim.no/), which has created covers and visuals for names such as Ulver, Mayhem and Darkthrone. As such, Madsen’s metal credentials are well established. So when creating music for Swarms, does he listen to such headbanging sounds?
– No, not at all. When I’m making this kind of music, listening to Metal is as inspiring as doing the laundry, Kim Sølve explains by email. While he lives in the same town as the interviewer, his hectic schedule makes such an interview format easier for him.
Love letters to Lustmord
The Silver Hour is pretty damn good, probably the best Norwegian dark ambient record in existence, it’s also quite typical of the genre. At times, the record sounds like a sort of sonic love letter to genre giants such as Lustmord. (http://www.myspace.com/lustmord) So it feels a bit as if Swarms is one of those acts that are more preoccupied with creating quality music than with storming the Bastille and rewriting the rules.
– You’re partly right in your assumption, explains Kim Sølve.
– Rewriting rules was never an ambition with this album, not by any means. But neither was it my intention to make an album that followed any guidelines or fit into any specific category. Making these kinds of sounds and compositions is more about following instincts than aiming at specific goals or trying to adapt to certain musical traditions.
I’ve been into industrial, ambient and experimental acts for fifteen years or so, but when I started working on The Silver Hour back in 2002, I don’t even remember if I was aware of the exact term “dark ambient”. I can honestly say I had no specific inspirations for this album. On the other hand, a lifetime of listening to obscure and experimental music is one of the things that have shaped me as a creative being (or whatever I should call myself), so in that way everything I’ve listened to and my musical preferences will always bleed into the music I make, explains Kim Sølve, who also seems quite used to Lustmord references.
The title “The Silver Hour” refers to the twilight between night and morning. Since I was a child, most of my profound, life-altering mental experiences and panic attacks have occurred around this time of the day. It has been and still is a physically and psychologically scorching affair that is quite outside reality (I will spare you the most personal details). Also, I have very vivid and disturbing dreams. Sometimes I keep on dreaming for a while after waking up in the middle of the night, and I experience and see things that I’m not really able to explain to others, except perhaps when I’m drunk. Similar things also happen to other people in my close family. These two experiences have similarities. There is a sense of being outside of reality, muses Kim Sølve.
Abandoned places
In keeping with this sense of unreality, the press release for The Silver Hour states that the recordings “were made visiting remote and abandoned places where nature has reclaimed what once was human and trivial and made it obsolete.” So what places are we talking about? And what does this mean for the music?
– All my life I’ve been fascinated by real-life places that have an otherworldly resonance; places that seem to belong less to this world than to my (or our) dreams. Eleven years ago I found an abandoned factory. Its derelict concrete constructions were left to decay and nature was slowly claiming it back. The atmosphere of this place had so much in common with the experiences mentioned above that it felt like a temple. So having found a place in real life that felt so much like my inner sanctum, I had to make use of it in any way possible.
I made a lot of trips there, exploring the place and its surroundings, taking pictures, bringing models there and of course recording sounds there, especially in the huge silo, which had an acoustic resonance that lasted at least 30 seconds or so. Performing sounds and instruments there was so spellbinding I forgot the recorder was running. It was narcotic and ceremonial. Then I brought the recordings to the studio and shaped and molded them into music over the course of many nights.
This isn’t meant as some academic dogma or something people have to know about to enjoy the music. But to me this approach was ritualistic. I believe in the ghosts in the sound; I feel that the spirit of these places transfers into the sounds and becomes an important part of the music, even for people who listen to the album without knowing about the process through which it was created, says Kim Sølve.
As one might expect from a band helmed by someone recently described by the quality newspaper Dagens Næringsliv as “one of the rising stars of Norwegian cover design”, The Silver Hour is excellently designed. So what inspires the visual side of Swarms? What comes first, the sounds or the visuals?
– They come independently of each other, but they stem from the same place and therefore also belong together. During the process of finishing this album I listened to it thoroughly while going through my archive of visual work, searching for a connection between sound and sight.
Fear, sex, death – and pissing chickens
– Other inspirations include fear, sex, death and what goes on in my head, to put it bluntly. Working visually is something that has been with me since I was a boy making ballpoint pen drawings of chickens pissing into chamber pots. I think I needed to draw to remain sane in a rather dysfunctional environment, and much of my childhood was spent listening to music and making drawings.
Besides this I often work with some kind of semi-automatic drawing where I try not to over-think what I do. Perhaps not to the same extent as Austin Osman Spare, but I do try to keep it pure and let it flow. Then I take these sketches and start working in a more organized fashion, realizing more intricate ideas and trying to make some sense from my experiences of strange mental states, to give them some form of meaning beyond just torturing me senseless. Having said this, I do of course also admire a lot of other artists, both past and present: Joel-Peter Witkin, Francis Bacon, Klimt, Bosch, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Helnwein, Horst Janssen, Kasner, Trevor Brown, Mattthew Barney, James Jean, Vania Zouravliov and Zdzislav Beksinski.
Ambient music is easy to poke fun at. Not only because it's easy to scoff at music that isn't necessarily made to be listened to actively – "wallpaper music" – but because of who this wallpaper music often appeals to, i.e. self-absorbed and dead serious Gothic types. Also, it has a lot of similarities to other forms of music that’s easy to ridicule, such as easy listening or even new age (yes, including the whale sounds…)
So how does Kim Sølve see these possible similarities? Does he consider his music to be something created to set a mood (as in easy listening) or manipulate someone’s spirit (as in new age?) Or both?
– Ambient to me is something to immerse myself in, a substitute for silence. It is a means to step into another reality. Or unreality, as I prefer to call it. Good ambient has transporting qualities, like a movie or a book or sex or witnessing something otherworldly. Making this kind of music feels like building the sceneries of a dream, where the thoughts can play out whatever your personal preferences find natural. More so than pop or hip hop or metal and other genres, ambient music leaves a lot up to the listener.One of the members of Swarms is a bass-player. This is very fitting, as one of the main elements of dark ambient music is the kind of deep, ominous bass rumblings that characterize the genre.
– There’s a lot of bass on this album, but no bass guitar. Petter, best known as the unorthodox bassist in Virus and Audiopain, is a highly competent and educated sound technician. He has been in Swarms since we started out in 1999 and was deeply involved in the making of this album, without ever touching the bass guitar.
That will change, because, to put it mildly, Swarms is a pretty fucked up collective. We will never stay put in any genre. People expecting another album like The Silver Hour will be surprised and possibly disappointed by what comes next. We do have a bassist and a drummer for a reason, and already when we started out almost ten years ago we have made music that differs greatly from “The Silver Hour”. In the last couple of years we’ve spent much of our time making music for dance and art performances. We even play guitars!
Swarms has an agenda, but it has close to nothing to do with other people and everything to do with personal growth, artistic ambitions and our collective pool of mental disorders.
