- New York's Ceremony Recordings has a (short) history of genre-dodging electronic music that continues with their newest signing, Malmö's Bam Spacey. His tracks are all slave to a rhythm, but none of them slot into subgenres very easily, emphasizing tune and texture over quantization. "Taigan" makes a fine curtain raiser, with its smeared-chord landscapes and high-pitched vocoders, but it's not until "Vi Delar Samma Grav" that Magnus Johansson's personality burns through the fog. Treading a path of heavy reverb with bouncy woodblock percussion, meditatively throbbing subs and melodic figures drenched in delay, it shares the same woozy over-romanticized feel as Hotflush's Beaumont.
"Dessa Bränder" and "Stilla" lean towards house and techno: the former has a defeatist limp anchored by an uneasy two-chord figure that sounds suspiciously close to The Eagles' "I Can't Tell You Why." The latter is even more forthright, propped up by shakers and hats and refracting the glint of the keyboards into flickering mirages. "Vintern Jagar" incorporates the tropical pop tint of his homeland—think Tough Alliance—and while there's a hint of sun-kissed bliss in there somewhere, the sadness is pervasive. It finally comes to the fore on closer "Rivieran." Here, Johansson's voice duels with a twinkling melody that wheezes and sputters its way to the finish line. His sugar-brined voice is the focal point of many of the tracks on Land, lending these lullabies a dark undertone that turns their cavernous echo chambers from grandiose to melancholic.
Tracklist01. Taigan
02. Vi Delar Samma Grav
03. Dessa Braender
04. Vintern Jagar
05. Stilla
06. Rivieran