Raoul Björkenheim

Finnish guitar virtuoso Raoul Björkenheim, whom has contributed to projects by the likes of Paul Schutze and Bill Laswell, musically erupts with his own explosive multi-instrumental dub orchestra of guitars and cataclysmic jungle of mind trips. The cover art, which depicts a macro shot of a human eye, is the portal into an altogether different experience. The listener gets sucked into the pupil and deep into a black hole of sound, one where guitars stretch beyond their human limits. For almost 50 minutes the listener is subjected to a foreign and highly exotic landscape of awkward yet soothing melody. However, serenity is not a constant. At times, Björkenheim, like the great Caspar Brötzmann, lunges right at your throat with his guitar and stops only a millimetre away to let you know that anything can happen without warning. The whole album feels as if you are arrested in a highly bizarre planet or country, where you are tied up and interrogated with ominous force, and at other times left alone on purpose for days on end to test the limits of your sanity, in some sort of morbid experiment in social deprivation. Björkenheim is highly inventive, dangerous, correct, clever and an extreme pleasure to listen to.