BORKO
Celebrating Life
(Morr Music)
By Erik Morse
Bjorn Kristiansson, a.k.a., Borko, is not only a chronic day-dreamer but a procrastinator as well. A music teacher and film composer living in Reykjavik, Borko has finally assembled an album, Celebrating Life, to follow his 2001 debut EP, Trees and Limbo (Resonant). The result – a collection of varying electronic and folktronic experiments that reaches back to 2002 – is a pleasing if dilettantish grab bag of bright charmers and absurd homages to the tundra. Kristiansson’s inspirations suggest an ambitious musical mind that seeks grand scope rather than minute detail.
The album’s opener, the appropriately titled “Continental Love,” is a wonderful introduction to Kristiansson’s musical topology, using synthesized horns and sampled vocal beats to simulate the expansive void of the Great North – a space more than a place – and, left largely to the romantic imagination, the perfect wintry allegory for longing. The next track, “Spoonstabber,” abandons these mammoth instrumentals for the doe-eyed vocals and electro-acoustic soundscapes of Amnesiac-era Radiohead, revealing Borko’s m.o. to be one less of tonal focus than generic catch and release. Lest we forget, this is pop and not process music.
Despite the childish titles, “Shoo Ba Ba,” “Sushi Stakeout,” and “Ding Dong Kingdom” dovetail into melodrama, using heavily processed keyboards, plangent electric guitars, and hypnotic coos and chimes – not unlike fellow Icelanders múm or Air in its lush soundtracking for The Virgin Suicides. Throughout, the playful melancholia of Borko evokes the cinematic regionalism of Guy Maddin or Dagur Kári, whose works similarly equate romance not with equatorial heat but with arctic hibernation. And Celebrating Life is filled with the kind of hit-and-miss magic that comes when an imagination overburdened with the possibilities of music seeks to create not only a new genre but a whole new continent of sound.