Disquiet

Corruption is nearing 2,000 tracks on the murky, rangy SoundCloud page that the Japanese producer maintains. In between vocaloid weirdness and even weirder video-game tomfoolery is a brief swath of X-Files-eligible moodiness, a cycling patch of cybernetic cicada sound design titled “magical WASTE.” The stamina represented by the Corruption account remains equal parts inspiring and mysterious. Every day or so, often multiple times a day, come bits of left-field sound that don’t so much collectively form a tapestry as accumulate into an ever larger sense of majestic disarray. It’s a true old-school internet marvel.

The word “stillhet,” I’ve been informed by Google Translate, means “calm” in English. The correlation isn’t much of a surprise, not given its first four letters — or its application as the title to three tracks released by Sweden-based cellist Henrik Meierkord. The collection is a gorgeous exploration of stillness — the cello echoed and layered, as likely to drift in the background as soar overhead, and more to the point to do so simultaneously, along with other iterations, often transformed by gentle electronic effects into something placid, ethereal, and introspective. The set is absolutely beautiful, though like so much stillness, underneath lurks a certain current of gravitas.

https://henrikmeierkord.bandcamp.com/album/stillhet