AM ENDE DER WELT

Weserbergland is made up of Norwegian progger Ketil Vestrum Einarsen who has been with the band "White Willow" for 20 years and has also worked with "Motorpsycho", "Jaga Jazzist" and others. In 2017, he released the first album "Sehr Kosmisch, Ganz Progisch" under this project name and that album, being a study in Krautrock born out of his love of his fathers record collection, landed the project under the Krautrock sub-genre.

In 2020, he gathered another set of musicians and created another album "Am Ende Der Welt". This album was aiming at a different kind of sound, and for that, he included Gaute Storsve on guitar, Jan Terje Augestad on piano, Maria Grigoryeva on strings and Molesom creating effects from turntables. These artists, along with himself manipulating sounds and etc on his computer, created this two track album, which is actually one track split into two tracks in order to place it on Bandcamp.

Listening to this wonderful and interesting melding of sound, the listener will notice that it is almost nothing like the traditional Krautrock at all. While it is true that Einarsen takes the basic idea of krautrock in creating a piece of art that follows the drone-like, seldom changing chord structure of the genre, he completely goes beyond any other boundaries of the genre, stepping freely into avant-garde and electronic territory and then surrounding everything with the organic sounds of traditional instruments. It takes the krautrock roots and transforms them into an almost alternative universe of "What if Krautrock ended up sounding more complex and sans melodies and constant rhythms?" The result is something almost completely unlike anything else.

The music starts off simple enough, seemingly naïve and almost ambient. But almost right away, there are some infusions of minimal electronics and effects that create this lovely soundscape. As the track continues with no real agenda or hurry of any kind, it transforms as it goes, until eventually you are in this drone-like atmosphere of otherworldly sounds and layers, all of the instruments contributing their usual sounds but being manipulated here and there by effects and etc. The music ventured away from anything resembling a melody as its real purpose is to explore sounds and combined layers of sound. The first part does rely on dynamics much more as it flows from walls of sound to softer and more intimate sections that all eventually build back up again. The second part of the track, however, is much more thick and heavy, most of it made up of several layers of improvised sounds that gel together by fluctuating around the same key. The center of the 2nd part is very dense and demanding, but listening closely, you will notice that each instrument has it's individual part as the effects continue to manipulate an growling and almost vocal sound along with it. During the last 4 minutes of the 2nd part, the sound all starts to deconstruct itself and Einarsen manipulates his flute by torturing the sounds that come out of it.

The translation of the title means at the end of the world. It really fits is you let your imagination wander. The album is dark and demanding, yet the instruments are bright. It is quite pleasant to listen to at times, but wanders off into extensive sections of noise and chaos. It all seems to hang on a very thin line between electronic avant-gard music and contemporary straight-out classical music. It is definitely not for everybody and those that love krautrock will probably be uneasy with the genre designation, but the basics of the genre are there, they are just overtaken by a modern impressionistic style. During the first half of the track, it was easily hinting at being a 5-star recording, but the long, noisy section that makes up most of the 2nd half brings it down a bit. However, I will still highly recommend this to someone that loves the avant-garde style with a lot of electronic manipulation paired with traditional sound. Definitely a very intriguing and interesting album, but very dense at times and difficult to penetrate. I can see it possibly getting better with more listens, but for now it is a 4.5 star album rounded down to 4 stars, but showing a lot of promise.

EDIT: Coming back to this album over and over again, I have come to appreciate it even more so much as to include it in my AOTY list for 2021. Honestly, now I don't know how I could have given it only 4 stars. It has grown on me immensely, so I changed my rating to 5 stars. This is one that takes time to be fully appreciated.