Washburn via Sweden

Moljebka Pvlse is actually someone named Mathias Josefson, a Stockholm, Sweden-based electronic musician. He toured the U.S. early this fall with his countryman, Mikael Stavostrand. You wouldn’t know from your first taste, but the six tracks on the appropriately titled Koan (Eibon/Prefeed) are based, in large part, on the sound of a Washburn guitar. There’s a real thrill, if that’s the appropriate term in such downbeat circumstances, to hear him work hard to posit tiny details amid huge clouds of ambiguous sound. The music seems to bend under its own weight as it progresses from one track to the next. “Micchaka” is a fairly traditional atmosphere, albeit rich beyond most electronic musicians’ abilities. “Parshva” lopes with an extremely slow, automated pace. “Zhijian” will test your speaker’s bass response with its brobdingnagian heart murmur. All the tracks fade in slowly, magnifying their dread, like a particularly bad Monday.