In 2019, the Swedish band Isildurs Bane and the English singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist Peter Hammill surprised and delighted their respective fans by collaborating for an album, "In Amazonia". While this union seemed destined to remain unique, the artists, stuck but also inspired by the Covid, did it again two years later with "In Disequilibrium".
The album contains two suites, each cut into several tracks. "Suite" is perhaps not the right word because the different parts of each one are only linked by tenuous sounds and can be listened individually. But they are welded together by the musical atmosphere that runs through them and makes them complementary.
Thus the three movements of 'In Disequilibrium' are crossed by a dense and intense music, a maelstrom of sounds constituted by multiple layers of instruments (perfectly restored by a limpid production) playing a very free score, the whole dominated by a Peter Hammill very in shape alternating percussive and aggressive vocals and atmospheric head voice. The title is particularly well chosen so much the listener has the impression that the music is in constant unstable balance ready to break, but catches up in extremis every time it wavers. The originality and the experimental side of the ensemble resolutely evoke the King Crimson and Van der Graaf Generator of the great days.
The four movements of 'Gently (Step by Step)' are quite different. Where the first suite was nothing but breathless sonic fury, the second plunges the listener into a stripped-down, soft, sometimes atmospheric neo-classical music. Rage and fear have given way to a breath of melancholic oxygen, the sometimes dissonant and angular sonorities are supplanted by others more harmonious and delicate. The very open orchestration, mixing electric and acoustic instruments, allows to fully enjoy the multiple keyboards, strings, winds and percussions used.
"In Disequilibrium" seems to be made for the vinyl with a first side experimental, dense and aggressive, cataclysmic like a volcanic eruption, and a second one soothed and melodious evoking a misty water table by a cold morning. If "In Amazonia" was already the fruit of a beautiful collaboration, "In Disequilibrium" allows Isildurs Bane and Peter Hammill to bring out the best of themselves in a perfectly successful fusion, evoking the so particular universes of each one without one prevailing on the other. It only remains to hope that the fruit of this osmosis gives them the desire to continue this superb adventure.