Lost Landscapes with Erik Wøllo's Solastalgia: Echoes November 2024 CD of the Month
by John Diliberto 11/04/2024
The world is changing. Even if you are a climate change denier, you can see the landscape around you altering as development replaces forests and farmland and industry builds giant warehouses and business centers on what used to be open fields. As you watch the woodlands you played in and the meadows you wandered through as a child being plowed under and built up; as the sound of construction replaces the sound of birds in the trees and wind through the leaves, you might be suffering from solastalgia. That’s a term coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht that combines “solace,” “solus”(grief) and “-algia” to mark the existential depression you feel as the environment changes. The prolific Norwegian guitarist and electronic musician Erik Wøllo uses this term as the basis of a double CD of tone poems called Solastalgia, reflecting those changes and what has been lost.
Erik Wøllo should be no stranger to Echoes listeners or fans of electronic, space and progressive music. He’s been a fixture on the show from the very beginning of Echoes 35 years ago. And he was at it before then, releasing his debut in 1983 and dropping some 53 albums since then. At least eight of those have been Echoes CD of the Month picks.
Solastalgia is vintage Erik Wøllo, with the cyclical grooves, arching textures and soaring, but never pyrotechnic guitar. He’s sculpted a tone poem traversing these environmental changes and loss. While it is full of melancholy, I think you will also find some solace here.
The opening track. “Aerial,” serves as an overview thematically and musically, beginning in space and floating high with the clouds, looking down on the planet. Wøllo gradually accelerates into a churning, almost African rhythm that surges while he lays long curling guitar sustains over the top.
Wøllo plays a lot with rhythm, never using a straight four-four without adding a lot of syncopation. That’s how “Shoshin Voyage” evolves. It begins with a syncopated four-four groove topped by a simple, to the point of childlike, melody on synth-guitar, switching timbres to a bluesy, more conventional guitar sounding melody, sparely placed in the shifting landscape of the ongoing groove.
Wøllo’s melodies on Solastalgia are always spare and simple, only a few notes, which can make them sound like variations or simply the same thing. “Alternations” seems to be a reworking of “Shoshin Voyage” with a similar melody, but very different mechanical rhythm spiked by a softly clanging metallic accent.
“Forever River” lives up to its title. It has the feel of an endless flow as Wøllo lays a slowly pulsing rhythm worming through electronic eddies, until a guitar reaches out with another spare melody, before synths and/or guitar – hard to tell with Wøllo – soar like siren cries, long and yearning.
While Wøllo’s music is predominantly electronic, he does have an organic quality to his sound which goes back to his 1992 release, Solstice. You can hear that on tracks like “Prayer for Rain” with its tribal acoustic drum sound and sequencers fluttering in and out.
Sequencers do dominate this album. Every track is based on a rhythm loop that is usually joined by multiple melodic cycles revolving like overlayed wind-spinners. “Pandrone” is one of the most upbeat tracks on Solastalgia, with a thudding bass loop underpinning multiple sequencer cycles and an anthemic melody fragment loop. It is one of many tracks that reveal the influence of Tangerine Dream in his work.
There are 21 tracks on Solastalgia, the longest being nearly eleven minutes. That is “Light Pillars” which again, features a steady sequencer pulse and is almost entirely based around its electronic percussive cycles. Wøllo lays-in more of that sustained guitar, which is either a slide or EBow guitar.
Although Wøllo has collaborated with many musicians, the bulk of his work has been as a solo artist, toiling away in his studio on Hvaler, an island in the south of Norway. How much more isolated can you get? And you hear that in his music, a solitary reverie born out of solitude and silence. In that quiet Erik Wøllo traverses a landscape that shifts between the conscious and the unconscious, memories and laments. And there is no doubt that Wøllo is aware of the contradiction: that he accomplishes all this with technology while experiencing solastalgia. But overall, apart from its themes, Solastalgia the album, is a bath of drifting reverie, a voyage into the sublime and the serene.
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