‘Five Hundred Fink Experience’ consists of three drones – ‘drones for keeping sane’, is how Erik K Skodvin, aka Svarte Greiner, puts it. And, as the global lockdown continues and the Covid-19 crisis escalates, we could all do with an outpouring of sanity. The drones of Five Hundred Fink Experience are dangerously close to crossing the border, though, and once they leave the state, they’ll never come back. One can sink into the drones in the same way that one can slink into insanity and never fully resurface, never quite be the same again. Some experiences leave permanent scars.
The elongated drones sit in the air for minutes at a time, not really giving off much in the way of deviation, but that is precisely the point: it will help in taking the mind away from invisible killers because it keeps one in the zone, fixated on the sound, staring at its fixed point until everything else is erased, made absent and formless. Like a mindful meditation, the music is able to zoom in on texture and tone, providing an extreme close up so as to remove everything else. The medicine works.
Five Hundred Fink Experience is a temporary sedative against the constant stream of negative news, the tremors of anxiety, and the blood pressure-elevating five months or so of 2020. Named ‘Syringa’, ‘Wisteria’, and ‘Hellebore’, each track presents a different, distinct drone, living in a different register in another part of the world, removed from each other but also coming together, and each track offers a different tonality. The first is piercing, the second is deeper and emerges after the rain has fallen and the air is clear, and the third oscillates between its predecessors. It vibrates either due to an increase of stress or a mental instability brought on by isolation, slowly tipping the music over the state line and past the brink. Whichever way you look at it, Five Hundred Fink Experience is a one-way ticket to oblivion.
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