Who the fuck is Fyrskeppet I hear you cry…
In this instance it is not so much a who, as a what.
In the truly idiosyncratic style to which we have become addicted, Fyrskeppet – or Swedish for Lightship is the latest incarnation of Daniel Westerlund, aka The Goner, aka E Gone.
That he returns in a guise, hauntingly familiar to my sea faring lineage, is a particular delight.
I spent most mid-70’s school holidays aboard my father’s trawler, in and around the Faroes and Iceland. An unwitting observer and participant in the last instalment of the “Cod Wars”, even being rammed on occasion by the Icelandic Gunboat!
Hostilities aside, it was all life shaping, ‘Boys’ Own Adventure’ stuff. Witnessing Fjords on storm lashed, high seas as a 10 – 12 year old, gave an epic and elemental appreciation, for the benign beauty and random vagaries of Mother Nature.
Early lessons on insignificance, helped shape an understanding for what truly matters in this life.
Later, surfing in the 90’s brought me to most of the lighthouses, dotted around Scotland’s rugged mainland and island outposts. An inshore counterpoint, to my earlier offshore adventures.
The press release from the Awkward Formats Label assures, “On this latest release Westerlund adopts a new moniker – Fyrskeppet – and switches his habitual sound for a reflective ambient and drone-based meditation on oceans, elemental dangers and abysses, in an album of analog synths, piano, zither, pump organ and violin.”
Or as Daniel himself eloquently puts it, “If E GONE is earth and fire, FYRSKEPPET is water and air.”
Scandinavia, like myself, has been defined by the sea, an ancestral affinity here given aural substance…
’27 000 hefnerljus’, (or 27 000 light units), radiates it’s illuminatory, searchlight beam, sea spray etching your windward face, to hummed, lullaby enraptured swells; ‘Östra Kvarken’, (or narrow sea throat between Sweden and Finland), gently surges with a hypnotic relentlessness, an inundating and immersive, trance inducing slumber; ‘Linslykta av sjätte ordningen’, (or lens lantern sixth order), plunders forlorn mystical depths, the timbre of this dirge like soliloquy, ensnares and beguiles the psyche, with a winged-siren like irresistibility…
‘Mistsirener, hösten 1894’, (or autumn mist sirens), conjures the sight and sound of the Girdleness Foghorn, or countless lost days and near misses at sea, enveloped in this blanketing, sensory befuddling phenomenon; ‘Almagrundet, 20 dec 1921’, (or shallow on which the ‘Alma’ grounded), is a semi-quavering lament, a lilting seafarer’s warning, a melancholic, archipelago nourishing adagio…
‘Sydostbrotten’ heaves with elusive pulsing torrents, Ægir pitching in with serene, draught imperilling indifference…
Available now digitally on the Awkward Formats Label and bandcamp. All songs by Daniel Westerlund, recorded at The Salt Vault in 2014, Mastered by Antony Ryan.
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