With their debut ten years ago, Midaircondo had already established themselves as a constant in the Swedish scene between The Knife and Twice A Man, fusing pop and electronic experimental music. At the time still a trio, Lisa Nordström and Lisen Löve constantly brought in guest artists as support. On the recording of their latest and fourth album, however, the invited guests remain silent, with their job being instead to add to the intensity and atmosphere in the studio, while the two improvise in the form of a veritable two-woman orchestra. A studio that you imagine to be large and dark, like the foyer of an enchanted mansion, pervaded by voices that find no sleep, with whose brittle, semi-transparent materiality the wind appears to play. In addition, softly shifting melodic fragments float through the air, from kalimba and zither, a texture-creating bass flute and accents of a tenor sax, which under Löve’s breath lends the haunting a dry, jazzy, warm melancholy. The two then repeatedly send post-industrial modernity through this in the form of throbbing beats, cajoling humming, cool loops, and in doing so provide contrasts that are as surprising as they are well-placed. At the same time, the dreamlike drifting arranges itself into a poppy grip in such moments. With these dark aisles (»Veins«) one thinks of Golden Diskó Ship, with the brittle flashing light rhythms (»Quakes«) of Lucrecia Dalt, but finally it is the vocals that remind us throughout that we are dealing with two ladies. The expressive realms through which they roam here not only open to them because of their female voices. But they lose me there at times. The drums, which Mika Takehara takes over in the frosty »Panther«, make me listen carefully again and then disappear at the end of »Closure«, which rises from the gothic scraping to let everything heavy fall away.
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