Less One Knows, the latest album from Norwegian composer Benjamin Finger, is an anthill. It’s subdued, humbly tucked into cracks in the patio; solid, impossibly intricate, and huge from the inside. But it’s also delicate enough you feel you could put your foot right through it. Stripped-down and intimate, this album commands attention precisely because it does not ask. Think Godspeed side-project Thee Silver Mt. Zion and you’re halfway there. But Less One Knows dodges Efrim & co.’s pomp for something far smaller in scale; an icky, paranoid chamber piece riddled with delays and sustained atonal squawks.
‘Open Phase’ is a stark opening which sits on the brink between melody and noise. The track constantly threatens to succumb to itself and feedback indefinitely, but never quite reaches that terminus. Instead it stretches the tension out through several minutes. The tone which backbones the track is reminiscent of the opening of Bowie’s Station to Station; a primer for the oddity and discomfort which will follow.
The same technique is deployed at various times throughout Less One Knows. We transition between ‘Head Fading Blues’ and ‘Worried Sick of Echo’ with elongated, piercing tones as our guide. Like with the iconic one-note solo of Talk Talk’s ‘After the Flood’, we think we’re hanging in stasis—but we’re really shifting gears abruptly between warring anxieties. The transition between these two tracks marks the first of several times on Less One Knows that we are forced to reprogram and re-orient through a feverish, depressive soundscape.
‘Bothered Earwaves’ is a similarly foreboding instrumental; screaming in rhythmic ire like a siren—the collective breaths of a wasps’ nest.
The tension of Less One Knows does occasionally submit to warmth—a switch signalled by the appearance of Finger’s vocals. The album’s title track is the first instance of these; fretful, desolate, brief and near-inaudible—crushed by instruments soon after they appear. The last is ‘Once Upon a Dirty Sound’: a song which is half-shoegaze, half-Jandek. A dissonant piece of blues improv, the track is at once this album’s loneliest and most welcoming piece.
On ‘Crushed At Sea’, vocals are performed much more confidently, and bloom into Clear Moon-era Phil Elverum confessionals. The track is almost like a mission statement for Less One Knows. Lyrics are at first buried beneath a wash of hopelessness. After growing more naked and audible as the track progresses, they appear most clearly with its final lyric: “…vanish”. The sound of a human voice feels like cresting out of a dark, wide sea after struggling to the surface. Then, it’s gone.
Less One Knows is available for pre-order and streaming here. Releasing April 17th.
Words: Andrew O’Keefe