Voices and Organs

Per Lindmark, who heads up the Voices and Organs project, has created not so much an album of songs but a scrapbook of sounds and melodies. The idea for Orphanage took earlier shape as a short story cycle, a fraction of which ended up being used as a lyric sheet of lines scattered sparingly amongst the album’s 18 tracks. These songs flow backwards and forwards through time, both offered for the future and drawn from the past. Childhood reminiscence and all the mistakes of memory haunt the soundscapes. At times, the already blurred piano lines and guitar figures compete with grainy street noise and voices through walls that eventually loop, repeat and subsume the place of music entirely. Like a poorly sealed time capsule whose contents have decayed and molded together, its purpose of retrospection seems corrupted but becomes a truer record of time’s passage and the way memories are kept. At turns soothing, unsettling at others, Orphanage creates a complex musical space for interpretation and emotional investment.