Skyphone - "Avellaneda"

Skyphone - Dream Tree Lemurs (Rune Grammofon 2008)

Skyphone - Avellaneda / Rune Grammofon

The train doors opened and I walked over to the opposite side of the car to my usual seat. I like to sit there because it allows me to leave the train faster when we finally get to where I'm going. I also do it out of habit, found that it's best to have a routine in the morning not because it provides stability in an otherwise unpredictable day, but because I know where I'm going when I'm still asleep. It was then that I pulled out Finnegans Wake and resumed where I'd last left off a few weeks ago. I read barely a dozen pages in 40 minutes.

When I got to work, I popped in Skyphone's Avellaneda and listened to its gentle sonic palette. It's a stunningly soothing album, but that's not what hit me. It was this particular passage from Joyce's final novel that finally got me writing this review.

Then Nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one. She cancelled all her engauzements. She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuée! Nuée! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone. And into the river that had been a stream (for a thousand of tears had gone eon her and come on her and she was stout and struck on dancing and her muddied name was Missisliffi) there fell a tear, a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears (I mean for those cry-love fables fans who are 'keen' on the prettypretty commonface sort of thing you meet by hopeharrods) for it was a leaptear.

What was it that brought the synapses of Skyphone to this particular paragraph? I listened again to the delicate chimes and subtle electronic clicks and clacks of "Schweizerhalle," and I began to understand. This is a melancholy record. It isn't necessarily one of those sad-sack albums where you just play it all day because you're stuck inside and it's raining or snowing out and the heat isn't on high enough. This album has a genuinely sad sound in its core. It brims with bright bells and light electronic blips, but you could play this on a sunny summer day with every kid at the playground sporting a stunning smile and it would make no difference. This is the sound of calm acceptance that the world is an ugly place. It's also the sound of accepting that you can still find beauty in it.

Information is difficult to come by for Skyphone - their name tricks Google into thinking you want Skype, their website last listed an update in January, Rune Grammofon gave them a quiet release date nearly two months ago - and as such it's easy to open up their music to all sorts of interpretations. I wonder what's really in the minds of childhood friends Keld Dam Schmidt, Mads Bødker and Thomas Holst. Their deep bond stretching back to their youth in the south of Jutland has had some kind of effect on their music, because you can hear the comfort levels affecting the music. As on 2004's Fabula, Skyphone are once again exploring the rich depths of what was once popularly known as folktronica.

Four years ago, that would have been a major cause for attention. Indeed, they scored a nomination for "Best Band" at that year's Danish music awards, the Steppeulven. But tastemakers have gradually drifted away from guys like Four Tet and The Books for no apparent reason, and Skyphone has been left to a much smaller audience, albeit one that's likely less jaded by flavor-of-the-week prefixes and labels. Not that it must matter much to them, since this album feels insular. It feels like a secret handshake between friends, a knowing nod among trusted colleagues at the office. It is overtly playful, yet innately somber.

This is partly due to the instruments, a mixture of modular and analog synthesizers, toy instruments, bass, and guitars. "Cloudpanic" is a fine example of Nuvoletta's leaptear, an effortlessly sad melody buoying buoyant electronic aftereffects. The quiet horn (or sampled voices?) on "Yetispor" add a human element, an organic breath into the life of this album. It's not the only time. There are plenty of cases where natural instruments work with the digital ones to make an introspective beauty that's rarely been found this year.

You could say that anyone who sounds remotely folktronic is doing the same thing, but I believe Skyphone are different. Hell, they beat the odds by joining the Rune Grammofon roster without actually being Norwegian; shouldn't anything be possible after that? Yet Avellaneda is a reassuring hand on the shoulder that, no actually, there is a limit to the end of that sky. And no matter the number of childy cloudy cries you may have in you, it will never change. There are only so many taxpayer dollars for astronauts. The warmth of this record, the knowing hug that things will somehow be okay (even if only eventually) are all we can provide ourselves with for the time being. Avellaneda is the soundtrack to that defeated feeling. The train doors opened, back home to fall asleep and do it all again tomorrow barely a dozen pages further forward in life. It's not so bad living life half-awake, you know.