Under the moniker of Varg, Jonas Rönnberg runs a cunning operation.

Covert transmissions, alongside penetrating statements from techno’s core, are stacked adjacent to self-assertive live performances with an agility and depth of focus rarely summoned so instinctively. With a still-rising presence, Rönnberg makes sense of the decadent overdose privy to underground musics at this time. And producing work on his own prolific schedule, his barely-controlled chaos isn’t stopping to check that you’ve noticed.

Presiding over Stockholm’s Northern Electronics label with Abdulla Rashim, Rönnberg casts a cryptic shadow from the North over contemporary aesthetic platforms in club musics as well as the long arc of experimental music practices. The latter is best understood in terms of the collaborative pact with Copenhagen’s Posh Isolation, which has most notably given rise to Body Sculptures, a group that brings Rönnberg together with Loke Rahbek, Puce Mary, and other unique voices in European electronic music today.

Tempering a caustic rhythmic sensibility with a pneumatic palette for high definition synthesis, Rönnberg’s unique embrace of risk tests the reliability of the forms he works in as well as the genre borders he surveys. His crucial techno releases on Semantica Records and Avian (as The Empire Line) are a beacon amongst his engulfing ambient side projects such as D.Å.R.F.D.H.S. (Opal Tapes) not to mention the persistent after-image of his black metal roots.

It takes a vandal’s logic of intuition to make this work, let alone make it this thrilling. But if you can break into the penthouse, you may as well stay and coerce the havoc with a bottle of someone else’s champagne in hand. And, yes, you should be suspicious of what you know you haven’t seen—it’s obviously intimidating.

Varg now presents the Nordic Flora Series.

Flora—it’s a system, and its existence is beholden to its innermost workings. It designates interaction, it describes life as process, and it collects and repurposes its most crucial mechanisms towards ends that we presume to understand. Take the circumstances of club cultures, purported underground cultures, whatever’s rising against—it, too, is a system, and its existence is likewise beholden to its determining parts.

The Nordic Flora Series sees Varg coursing a path as natural to his work to date as it is synthetic to whatever you want to measure it with.

Spread across his own Northern Electronics label, which he jointly runs with Abdulla Rashim, as well as Copenhagen’s Posh Isolation—to name just two of the syndicated labels—the Nordic Flora Series is a constellation, a vast community of iridescent pieces that, taken as a whole, effect a torrential storm. Programmed for despatch over the coming year in voluminous formats both conventional and novel, you’ll undoubtedly hear about it all, or at least once the transmission signals are deciphered.

The first two episodes have made their gestures, and now the album Gore-Tex City, third in the Nordic Flora Series, can lacerate expectations.

Varg – Nordic Flora Series Pt.2 : En ros röd som blod (3 x Cassette – Posh Isolation)
https://soundcloud.com/northernelectronics/sets/varg-nordic-flora-series-pt2/s-be2Zc

The familiar registers of Varg’s work are here, but the chaos has never been this enterprising. Stealth dance floor assaults are layered with lobotomised, spoken word meetings in malls, and free-form electronics pepper acoustic bereavement motifs. It shifts from heavy to chronic as blown-speaker-rap stubs out cigarettes in gated techno enclosures. It’s an evocation of some kind of disturbance that will amount to something singular, purposeful and sure-footed, so consider this a warning.

Taking the breadth of genres and methods that are found in the sediment of his work, Varg envelopes all the terrain that he can with as much as he can. Yet the Nordic Flora Series pays vexing hassle to its enabling systems. With it, Varg is coasting his own way through, and in doing so breaches conventions that help keep the whole in check. The series is a bit of a fuck off, but it’s a smirking fuck off. It’s a set, slowly revealing its hand, a dialogue with what will only becomes apparent in time.

There’s a rush, and you’ll lose your footing, so orientate yourself in the space. Varg’s already disappeared, but the flowers are just starting to bloom.

All tracks written and produced by Varg.
Cat. No. NE36 & NE39 – all rights reserved
Artwork by Cali Thornhill DeWitt.
Mastering by Neel at EnissLab, Rome.
Ⓟ & © Northern Electronics 2017
northernelectronics.se

‘Nordic Flora Series Pt. 3: Gore-Tex City’ on request, please contact music@modernmatters.net  Thank you!

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