Minilogue
Blomma

5.0
classic

Review

by Trifolium USER (33 Reviews)
October 9th, 2022 | 92 replies

Release Date: 2013 | Tracklist

Review Summary: Life through a synthetic lens.

This is an album full of contrast. To me, that’s one of the main reasons why I think Minilogue’s second full length Blomma is so special. One moment we are outside, in full sunlight, with birds actually chirping and a choir cascading down from faraway clouds. Yet 20 minutes of slow, unhurried developments later, you’re in a cave, where deep, earthy bass synths are coming from below and the occasional clear tone stabs through the darkness. Next to this contrast in mood, there’s contrast in genres. Some of this is straight, four-to-the-floor techno or house, with repetitious bass and drum loops. On the other hand there is a very clear jazz influence to be found here, which even borders on free style occasionally.

Yet the biggest contrast here is how alive everything feels. This contrasts with a stigma that is, often unfairly, associated with electronic music: that it is robotic and cold, music of the mind, not of the heart. Of course, sometimes this isn’t at all a false assumption. However, for Blomma it couldn’t be further from the truth. It is brimming with biological energy, be it produced by photosynthesis or derived otherwise. This sensation isn’t caused by the chirping birds or the croaking frogs that can be heard on here either. Marcus Henriksson and Sebastian Mullaert explicitly employed a live approach to Blomma, and that decision shows everywhere (and I mean: everywhere).

Blomma is the result of jam sessions with which the Swedish duo set out to create an album that was “as human as possible”, while using their beloved drum machines and analogue synths. During the development process, they would first create a rhythm, a sample or a loop and experiment with it. They would feel their way around with the sample, looking for how it reacts to manipulation and exploration. After this initial planning phase they would go into the forest that surrounded their studio, after which they started jamming. They thus created a clear division between the phase where they set the rules for the jam and the actual jam itself. With this, they aimed to play music that was firmly rooted in the emotional as opposed to the rational side of things (I promised this was an album full of contrasts!).

And boy did they succeed. What they ended up with is before you: a gargantuan 2.5 hour double disk, consisting entirely of jam sessions, edited into one big, seamless journey full of emotional twists and turns, explorations of different moods and mental states. Whilst this journey aspect to Blomma is very eminent, it was never the main goal. When speaking about the creation process of the album, Mullaert said “I always look for the hypnotic part of a track, a track that sucks you in. Then of course if there’s a story to it, with feelings and evolvement and all this, this is a bonus. But first of all it’s the hypnotic thing”. What makes Blomma into an even bigger success, then, is that it is both incredibly hypnotizing and plays directly onto the emotions of the listener.

As I said, Blomma is an album full of contrast. On here we have the sunny versus the nocturnal, the calm versus the energetic, the repetitious versus the progressive, the joyous versus the brooding. Yet, most importantly, we have the organic versus the synthetic. That, in the end, is this album’s main merit. Has electronic music ever lived as much as Blomma?

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