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  • Salt Marsh

    HEAD009

    Artist: Ass

    Label: Headspin Recordings

    With his third full-length album, Salt Marsh, released on Headspin Recordings, Andreas Soderstrom (aka Ass) seemingly adheres to this principle in creating an album which is so much more than the sum of its parts. Isolate any of its constituent tracks and you’ll be left with a handful of beautiful, folk-inspired songs but that’s only part of the story. An ambitious step forward after his excellent previous outings – the eponymous debut and its stark follow-up, My Get Up and Go Just Got Up and Went – Soderstrom delivers an album which builds on that earlier momentum but contorts it into new and interesting shapes, and which begs to be devoured whole.


    Unusually for an entirely wordless record, Salt Marsh appears to thematically link its seven songs, with musical motifs contributing to the overall mood and uniting the various strands Soderstrom introduces, not least the hushed, restrained squalls which bookend the album. Where previous Ass records largely consisted of tightly-woven melody and melancholy of his own making, this time around there’s a whole supporting cast of musicians on hand, with the intoxicating result being an impressive array of instruments and a fuller sound, while producer Johan Berthling – founder of the label Hapna and the band Tape – gives these wonderfully dense compositions room to breathe, including the myriad noises which add to their delicious complexity.


    Songs such as the winding ‘Astrid, Where Have You Been So Long?’ gradually build f...

  • My get up and go just got up and went

    HEAD007

    Artist: Ass

    Label: Headspin Recordings

    This is the follow-up to his astonishingly assured, eponymous selftitled debut. It finds him hacking through the folk undergrowth, his fluid dynamic underpinning a stark melancholy which simmers throughout. It’s a real treat, and a chance to hear the whispered charm of a subtly disarming performer. To paraphrase George Clinton - free your mind, and Ass will follow…

  • Ass

    HEAD005

    Artist: Ass

    Label: Headspin Recordings

    Ass debut album is a beautiful, mainly instrumental, folktronic journey, that probably started amongst “a jungle of strings” in his father’s bouzoki factory when Andreas was a child. Playing, of course, all instruments himself, he has given himself freedom to stretch out (and in) as it suited him. A lot of magic moments are collected here by this self-taught music man. But the interesting thing about Ass is the wholeness of it. Even though it is driven by “small” minimalistic musical ideas, or hymn-like melodies, it is the big picture that impresses. Andreas also sings on two majestic, but low keyed-tunes; Two Different Ways and Don’t You Tell A Word, with an almost melting voice, a crossover between a Thurston Moore and Jim O’Rourke