Artist: Jakob Battick
Album: Slow Motion Summer
Label: Lilien Hexen
Year: 2023
There's no album I listened to as often last year as Jakob Battick's "Slow Motion Summer." As its title suggests, it's like a temporal elixir, never failing to slow me down when so much of the rest of the world is conspiring to speed things up. The album is literally slowed down in post--you can hear it in the voice and drawn out tones. But like a musical microscope, Battick is revealing new depths and textures to the recorded sounds, and drawing out new meaning to the lyrics. This is cosmic psych folk with folkloric elements of black metal, but it's also equally indebted to biological, entomological and botanical concepts. With lyrics discussing spores and cicadas, I feel like this is the best science class I never had.
While so much of society is obsessing over Instagram filters and algorithms, Battick is fascinated by the natural order of the world, always looking deeper and more closely time and space. Their compositions are filled with a sense of wonder and exploration, like getting lost in a Miyazaki landscape. Listening to "Unfolding Ghost / Distant Glimmering Star," I have to ask is this the sound of birth, of some exploding star, the last gasp of life, or the fist moments of the afterlife?
Musically, I'm not even fully cognizant of what's going on--I'm sure there are synths and guitars and found sounds, but the album is so beyond the limitations of those descriptions. Slowing down the music decontextualizes the sounds, divorces them from their inception, and finds something more essential, more primal, within them.
This album reminds me of the nature documentaries of Jean Painlevé, whose films on aquatic life often border on the surreal. That's what Jakob Battick's music is like to me--one foot in reality, one foot in the ether, both hyperreal and surreal at the same time.
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