Now this...this is an odd record! Bjorn Olsson is best known as the guitarist for the hard-rocking Swedish band The Soundtrack Of Our Lives. He's written some really amazing, really hard riffs for that band, but his solo work bears no resemblence to his main gig. On this record (self-titled but lovingly referred to as "The Lobster"), Olsson has collected six short, pretty yet ultimately inconsequential instrumental pieces. These numbers are pretty, but feel incomplete; they simply sound like ideas, rather than finished compositions. End of story, right? Wrong.
At the end of the record is a track called "Insomning." This number is an hour-long composition, and it is composed of the previous seven compositions. He then looped them and placed them together, and he adjusted it so that after each song had cycle, the sound would decrease ever-so-gradually, until the listener had fallen asleep and the song was nearly inaudible. It's a strange, most bizarre idea--but it's an idea that works quite well. In fact, it's a bit puzzling as to why Olsson would include these shorter numbers and then repeat them at the end. Excluding the individual tracks in favor of simply releasing "Insomning" might have been a better idea.
Regardless of whether or not the first few tracks are really necessary, Bjorn Olsson is still an interesting experiment, and in fact "Insomning" is a handy little sleep aid.
--Joseph Kyle
Label Website: http://www.gravitation.nu
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