Italianate guitar is heard between a creaky door and train-station bells, and just above a foundation bed of vinyl surface noise. Wells of low-pressure feedback and heavily echoed piano make themselves heard. This is “Rumore del Roma,” off Recollage by Erik Nilsson. The title track is no different: same spaghetti western trip-hop vibe, all silverware percussion and romanticly strummed guitar, bonded by a heavy, slow bass line and made all the more enticing by occasions of whirry electric currents. The effect — a kind of frontier steampunk, all gunslinger accents and electronica undercurrent, broken-knuckle castanets and backward-masked samples — reaches its greatest achievement here on “Old Piano/Bad Back,” in which the six string is put on a loop that has just enough of an overlay to mark it as artificial (deliciously so), and punctuated with snippets of dialog and clockwork. The whole collection is tremendous.
Get the full set of eight tracks as a free Zip archive. More details at archive.org and the releasing netlabel, luxusarctica.wordpress.com. More on Nilsson, who is based in Stockholm, Sweden, at soundcloud.com/apanmusic.