Grift
Arvet

From Sweden returns Erik Gärdefors, the mind and soul behind the Grift project. I must say that I have great admiration for this artist, especially because what Grift offers and aims to represent is exactly what I seek and want to find in the extreme music from Northern Europe.

Tradition, folklore, the cold light of the North, silences broken only by the solemn and monstrous indifference of Nature, solitude, isolated and rickety small farms, inhospitable lakes, the sparse and composed vegetation, the thread connecting to the past, the music.

The meeting between ancient sounds and contemporary forms of expression found up there, in the musically "multi-decorated" Scandinavian peninsula, finds in Grift its most genuine form of expression and currently one of the most exciting. The voice, skillfully calibrated, now desperate and fierce, now slow and evocative, is of primary importance in this second album from our blonde misanthrope. Erik, in fact, demonstrates his ability to use it effectively right from the start, leading us to where he wants us to behold his vision of meditation on our roots. The word Arvet should mean "the heritage," the attempt to reconnect with what precedes us, especially in the virtual and hyper-technological era in which we are immersed, is well testified here by ritual pieces like "Morgon på Strömsholm," marked by formulas in the native language, ambient parentheses where our artist recreates atmospheres of anxious anticipation, nocturnal predators, the scream of a fox, and gusts of wind immerse us in that forest in which it is necessary to lose oneself to escape the "here and now," to connect with the spirits of our Ancestors, or with whoever awaits us in the "other dimensions." This inevitably brings me back to that timeless masterpiece which is Kveldssanger by Ulver, along with Bergtatt, frightful peaks of mastery and folklore, vehicles of primal fears, hymns to the evening, laments, and enormous Trolls masked as hills, like in Kittelsen's drawings, the true visionary of Nordic heritage. Erik Gärdefors writes, to explain his concept of tradition linked to this work, that no one can escape their own heritage, with this album, Grift "wants to illuminate the always ongoing journey from the small safe place in each man's heart to the great unforeseen life," our musician tells us, and that is exactly what he does, even with the aid of the Psalmodikon, a Swedish instrument used in the 19th century, useful for the otherworldly journey we are preparing to undertake. The album also features guest collaborators with Gärdefors, which you will discover by reading the beautiful booklet in an elegant A5 format, embellished with suggestive black-and-white photographs depicting the scenarios where Erik works and that then bring everything to life, as well as drawings by Johannes Bengtsson, which in my modest opinion are useful, indeed essential, to fully enter the spirit of the record. I also mention the video shot for the track "Den stora tystnaden" (The Great Silence), which picks up where the previous "Svédtorna," another precious video from 2015, had left off.

In conclusion, I add that the pleasure of discovering sounds which, while paying a clear tribute to certain sounds and attitudes of the past, remain firmly anchored to the earth and the mystery that separates us from that wild and fascinating nuance that is man's wonder in front of the surrounding elements, is liberating and worth the journey, always. If you wish to walk again on a simple but sincere path of "earth awakening" introspection, to put it like Hamsun, or if you're looking for a new soundtrack to revisit Bergman, try Grift. You'll find yourselves in the open countryside, towards evening, ready to discover what the night has in store for you.