No Solace in Sleep – Aarktica (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Band names don’t have to mean anything; what’s a Hoobastank, and have the history books ever recorded anyone being overwhelmed by a Flux of Pink Indians? But it is nice when a band’s name and music work in step to form a sonic brand. And this is the case with Aarktica and the music on No Solace in Sleep.

If the word soundscape is often overused, by me as much as anyone, this is one of those times when the label is justified, and this gently majestic debut album, now celebrating its 25th anniversary, uses ambient drifts, drone-sonics, and coiled, structureless post-rock sounds to paint a landscape as chilled as the band name suggests. And, as the titles allude, these musical realms may be as much metaphorical as literal, and the great thing about such lyricless musical passages is that it is left up to the listener to decide what any of it means.

“Glacia” reflects the imperceptible movement of ice, transitions that are only measured in hindsight and over years rather than days. It is a formless wave of, well, hardly music at all, not in most people’s understanding, but a coming together of music as emotion, music as art, asking the age old question of just where is the divide between music and, well, not noise but whatever lies beyond song and structure.

“The Ice (Feels Three Feet Thick Between Us)” is again open to interpretation, the natural world as a metaphor for a stalled relationship perhaps, “Welcome Home” is built of shards of shimmering and ice-edged guitars, and “I Remember Life Above the Surface” echos with both the cold, abysmal depths of the ocean and the chilled wind that races over the surface above.

Aarktica reminds me of the music made by Forest Robots, a celebration in sound of the natural world, in that case, the mountains, and the wilds of California. It is elemental music that captures the beauty and strangeness of those places yet untouched by human hands.

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