Smalltown Supersound
2007
My Last Day
About This Album
Like many of his electronically inclined Smalltown Supersound labelmates -- the kinder-whimsical duo Toy, leftfield house goofball Bjørn Torske, and twinkling neo-disco adventurers Lindström and DiskJøkke -- longtime label associate Kim Hiorthøy approaches his work with a decidedly offbeat sensibility and a fair amount of humor. My Last Day is Hiorthøy's first proper full-length since his 2001 debut Hei, and its prevalent quirkiness is immediately apparent in the nutty songtitles ("I Thought We Could Eat Friends") and head-scratching cover art (which is not by Hiorthøy, though he is a noted graphic artist and designer.) It's evident in the music as well, but the general effect isn't so much overtly goofy as it is curious and off-kilter in a naïve, almost accidental-seeming way. This is an album of abstract listening electronica (for want of a better term), but it's presented with none of the sense of purity, in sound and form, that the genre often entails: neither immaculate inhuman precision nor lush organic warmth, but a rough-cut bushwhack between the two; deliberately messy and faltering. With few exceptions (like the tense chase-scene electro of the opening cut), these pieces are primarily built around simple melodies picked out on somewhat out of tune pianos and other tarnished-sounding instruments, which are surrounded with all sorts of sonic detritus (scraps of ambient noise, found-sound percussion, stray notes from other sources, distant vocal fragments) and frequently yoked to choppy, hip-hop-inflected beats.
Track List (try tracks 1 and 7)

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