The prolific Swedish pianist and composer Matti Bye has long been associated with Northern Electronics, appearing on compilations and collaborations with Varg (Jonas Rönnberg). Between Darkness And White Snow marks his first solo full-length with the Stockholm label, capturing Bye's elemental radiance in four vignettes that render the perplexity of polarity with a grave assembly of textural phenomena and lyrical figures.
Born in 1966 in Stockholm, Bye is one of Scandinavia's most important film composers, with scores for Tove (directed by Zaida Bergroth), The Serious Game (directed by Pernilla August), and Everlasting Moments (directed by Jan Troell). He has won two Guldbagge prizes, the Selma Lagerlöf Mårbacka Prize, and the Nordic Harpa Award. His career began 25 years ago at the Cinematheque in Stockholm, improvising for early silent films by Fritz Lang, Victor Sjöström, and Jean Vigo, developing the unique method that defines his approach to sound.
For Between Darkness And White Snow, recorded in Fårö, Sweden in 2022, Bye employs a revealing technical setup: a 1926 Steinway Grand Piano played through an EMS Synthi A synthesizer, captured onto tape with a Nagra IV S recorder. The Synthi A, that legendary British synthesizer, here serves not as a sound generator but as a sonic lens, transforming the piano's acoustic properties into something suspended between recognition and abstraction.
Working within what has been called the neo-classical or modern classical movement (alongside contemporaries like Nils Frahm, Max Richter, Ólafur Arnalds, and Ryuichi Sakamoto), Bye processes acoustic sounds with tape loops and various electronic devices, embarking on journeys to the white spots of the musical map. His sense of structure derives from Schubert, Chopin, and Beethoven, while experimental styles like musique concrète expanded his understanding that the piano creates an environment of its own.
Musically, Bye moves within the realm of neo-classicism while also approaching romanticism, with references to post-romantic bands such as Kraftwerk and The Cure alongside classical composers. As one critic noted, Bye is mainly associated with his film music, but his work does perfectly well without images, something he truly demonstrates on this album. Like Nils Frahm's approach to capturing environmental sounds and piano intricacies, Bye's music walks a tightrope between what's spooky and what's beautiful.
The four unnamed pieces (I through IV) move through a quietly gloomy landscape on a grey winter's day, a growing sense of melancholy and unease, a little heavenly light gently uplifting, and finally a feeling of hope with subtle keys radiating from deep inside. As ephemeral harmonic mazes wilt into subdued distortion, we are left with a tentative invitation to gaze into the pooling material of Bye's compositions. The album has been described as deep, emotive and textured, offering melancholic tones for a dark winter landscape.
Mastered by Giuseppe Tillieci at EnissLab in Rome, Between Darkness And White Snow offers sound within sounds, rooms within rooms.
