Objekt4 - Her Face Among the Shadows objekt4
Reviews:
"Hydraulic creaks and myriad other disturbed noises creep to the surface from an underground dungeon in Objekt4's Her Face Among the Shadows. The eight-track collection by Sweden resident Anders Peterson, who “composed, decomposed, recomposed, coded, decoded, and encoded” the subtly menacing material, is largely dark ambient in character though occasionally animated by beats, typically hip-hop flavoured. His focus on spectral atmospheres is so consistent, the beats that abruptly appear in “Her Face” seem out of place. The lurching rhythms in “Foreverneverendeverend,” by comparison, more naturally emerge out of the setting's crime scene ambiance where swirls of buzzing flies suggest the aromatic presence of a decaying corpse. Even subtler, “Among the Shadows” undulates gently until clanking chains pierce the droning heartbeat that softly pounds throughout.
Much to his credit, Peterson eschews cheap theatrics—groans, screams, annihilating beats—others might have deployed for the genre in question; “A Way Away,” for example, ends the album on a peaceful (if gloomy) rather than harrowing note. Shaping his material in restrained manner ultimately enhances its impact by allowing the listener to visualize the album's desecrated landscapes (apparently, Objekt4's site also makes the release available in a 5.1 Surround Sound-CDR version, which, given the material's cinematic character, might be worth investigating). For those whose listening is as much label- as artist-oriented, Her Face Among the Shadows appears on the Czech label Ravenheart but would reside just as comfortably on Ad Noiseam or Sublight ."
--Reviewed on textura.org
"Rendered in two burst of creativity in 2004 and 2006, as soon as the Her Face Among the Shadows starts, we enter into a laboratory of Frankensteinian proportions, right out of some 1930s horror film from Universal Studios. All around us, vials bubble and machinery clanks as weird experiments in sound are conducted.
Swedish artist Objekt4 makes a variant of industrial ambient music that is dusty and rusty and run-down as soon as it is recorded. His off-kilter rhythmic tracks alternate with moodier, beatless ambient of a Lustmordian nature. Furthermore, the music seems to drift in and out of range, at times fading into near nothingness before emerging from the shadows again.
It is very much a dramatic, eight-act (eight track) Gothic play or the aural counterpart to a grainy, darkly romantic two-reeler from the silent era. The female face wreathed in shadow may well be that of Elsa Lanchester´s "Bride of Frankenstein". A delectably gloomy record."
Posted by Stephen Fruitman on sonomu.net
"There’s an eerie undertone to much of the cryptic rhythmical soundscapes on this latest offering from Swedish musician Objekt4. Reinforced by the scraping metal shanks that litter the later phrases of ‘Seclusion’, the intensity with which he builds this series of mechanised looping beasts into an uneasy pulse is quite engaging.
Objekt 4’s obtuse rhythms that seem to deconstruct themselves with an almost reckless disregard, convey a sense of impending doom – something echoed in the bleak landscapes that litter the artwork. Like being lost in some dark Nordic forest in the dead of the night, the smallest sounds from wind in the trees to the distant pulse of some lost drum pattern begin to take on sinister forms. ‘Her Face’, which commences with an almighty thump decays quickly into a murky subspace of deep drone and mid-range gusts of tone. These gusts bring with them a smell of gritty earth and it’s this overwhelmingly organic quality (made all the more real by some excellent use of reverb to add spatial depth) to draws you deep into this unfamiliar and somewhat unwelcoming realm.
Occasionally let down by the emergence of ‘straight forward’ beats, the character of this record for the most part is unsettled, uncomfortable and uncontrolled – it suggests a foreign world where the conventions usually associated with these sound palettes are removed or at least reworked into something far less recognisable."
--Reviewed by Lawrence English
"Anders Peterson offers an interesting take on the dark ambient genre with Her Face Among The Shadows, an Objekt4 release on the Czechoslovakian label, Ravenheart. Peterson takes equal parts Cold Meat Industry-style fascination with haunted factories and Eno-esque washes of ambient drift to make a record that certainly isn't cheery in its ambient texture, but it isn't filled with oppressive darkness either.
"Seclusion" shuffles along like a insomniac monk with bells and chimes in his pockets. In the cold stone hallways, the echo of his sandals is a shuffling rhythm, and the minute clatter of the metal in his pockets is both cacophonous and phantasmal. "Among the Shadows" wanders down a dark path, one very much haunted by the sort of insane asylum ghosts you'd find on a Atrium Carceri or a Lithivm record, complete with spectral winds, rattling chains and ominous gusts of sound that can't be the sound of anything friendly. "Her Face" strays into the light, adopting a downtempo beat, but there is an infection in the beats that causes them to trip and tumble, lending a sickly stumble to the rhythms.
A dark-hop breakdown summons "Foreverneverendeverend," a looping drone of synthetic noises that moves like a squall line on the horizon. Thunder rhythms ebb and flow within the dark veil of clouds. A human spirit haunts "She Elven," where a woman's voice floats in the mix, wordlessly calling to us through a miasma of industrial exhaust; while "Nowhere Everywhere" rises with the break of day, a delicate thermal updraft that starts to uncurl heretofore frozen melodies into faint streams.
Objekt 4's dark ambience further texturizes the shades of grey that exist between the terror of complete darkness and the new age ephemera of daylight. Her Face Among The Shadows is a walk in the gloom, but there are breaks of sunlight."
--Reviewed by theeasternfront.org