Pitchfork

A collaboration between Norwegian duo Fe-Mail and Brooklyn's Carlos Giffoni makes so much sense creatively, it's surprising that Murphy's Law didn't find a way to spoil the result. Both acts see electronic noisemaking as the careful arrangement of small aural events rather than the sound-wall splurge that noise artists often fall back on. But pairing such sonically busy types could have produced musical overkill, with each participant fighting for space or canceling each other out. Instead, Northern Stains is a smart synthesis of Giffoni's pointed, rapid-fire compositions and Fe-Mail's mix of sliced vocals, horns, and samples.

The five tracks here avoid becoming a blurry boxing match due to one simple strength: timing. By assembling distinct sounds that loop, pile up, and crumble back down, Fe-Mail and Giffoni have always used timing as a primary compositional tool on respective individual releases. Here, those crafty patterns hold up well when added together. Each piece is built around the when and where of each noise, perhaps even more so than what each noise actually sounds like.

The strongest example is "Daymare Blues", the album's seven-minute centerpiece. Here, the sonic range is relatively narrow; nearly every sound is vocally derived, mostly cartoon-like squawks and yelps. But the way the trio release and retract each blip and blurt is uncannily rich. It produces patches of melody, off-kilter beats, rhyming figures that leap over each other, and loops that fuse into abstract wholes like strokes in a Pollock painting. The piece may sound abstract, but its careful structures make it more a song than an experiment, much like the way Raymond Scott's sound-effect compositions are more like short stories than strings of one-liners.

Similar patterns form, collapse, and rebuild throughout the album. "Moral Heritage" melds video-game lasers and spiky growls (reminiscent of Nautical Almanac's impulsive rants) into a wash of guitar strums drenched by digital crunch. Later, "Come, You Are" sticks a chugging loop under stereo-spanning distortion ripples, while "Not in Santa's Land" mixes rapid blips and engine-like roar into an eerie synth cloud.

The only anomaly on Northern Stains is its title track, which doles out noise in longer, thicker streams. It opens with Fennesz-like wash, then builds into the kind of dense squeal favored by underground noise-hounds like Hive Mind and the Cherry Point. But even this track feels more like a brainy composition than simply a sheet of sound hung out to dry. The tactile surface of the escalating drone gives the piece a detailed topography that in lesser hands might have been a smooth, unspectacular wave. Like the rest of Northern Stains, it blurs the line between structure and abstraction, but the craft behind it is crystal clear.