Forget the inconclusive repetitiveness of certain ambient or the cheap spirituality of much new age music; if you want to try listening to instrumental compositions capable of caressing your hearing and making you reconcile with the ‘whole universe,’ even if you will struggle to pronounce it, Skogslandskap is for you. It undoubtedly turns out to be easier to memorize the name of the artist behind the eponymous project, Norwegian Vàli who, with his acoustic guitar supported from time to time by four other magnificent musicians, gives us three quarters of an hour of music as delicate as it is moving. Skogslandskap is divided into fifteen short tracks that follow one another without for a moment the sense of boredom or addiction to a type of sound normally at risk in this respect surfacing; it is enough to listen to the opener Nordavindens Klagesang, a gem that kicks off this journey inside the Norwegian forests in the time span between sunset and the next sunrise, to perceive how much the music produced by Vàli eschews cloying technicalities revealing itself, instead, as a magical succession of sounds capable of moving in unison with the surrounding nature. The path by which Vàli leads us, winds harmoniously through the murmurs of plants, the frantic pawing of nocturnal animals, the intoxicating effluvium of the earth bathed in night humidity to end with the final four minutes of Morgenry, a concentrate of pure magnificence and moving poetry that makes the need to listen again from the first track to this masterpiece inescapable. Skogslandskap picks up where it left off a good nine years ago with Forlatt, making an objectively rather long period of time seem as short as a breath of wind. Rediscovering that record is therefore a duty, as is listening to this timeless music, which is capable of leading us back to our natural status as guests of the planet, which suits us better than that of usurpers of a kingdom that does not belong to us.

2013 – Prophecy Productions