Last year, Petter Friberg absolutely floored me with the sheer stunning beauty of Optical Flow.  As is usually the case with albums of that quality, I was quick to get it into the hands of the few discerning souls I knew who’d have an appreciation for the austere minimalist constructions Friberg’s been producing for quite some time now.  The result, each and every time, was of open-jawed awe.

Optical Flow was my favorite album of the year from the moment I heard it, and I’m sure no other album received so many front-to-back listens as it did, in as many different environments, in as many different moods.  It was, and remains, perfect.

One of those friends I’d passed last year’s release on to let me know Friberg was back with Laponia. currently out on netlabel Thinner.  I didn’t even know he had a new one on the way, so it was a greatly appreciate return of the favor.  From the very first quavering notes, it is clear that this new Motionfield album is picking up where Optical Flow left off.  That’s an important distinction, because it is not “more of the same” here  - it’s a progression and maturity of a sound that I wasn’t sure could get any more of either.

Throughout the album, sounds of daybreak dawns and distant whoops and chirps filter through a pastoral gauze of maternal comfort.  Track three, “Kebnekaise”, is the first to feature percussive rhythm, and what is present dances lightly on the periphery for, at first, only a short amount of time, echoing and delaying with a mid-stereo field drumskin tap drawing it together, until the rhythm posits itself in a central but unobtrusive place among the soundwash.

I found myself drawing comparisons to the more ambient work of Robin Guthrie, specifically the Mysterious Skin soundtrack, or a much more restrained Boards of Canada, but as with most things of this calibre, it’s best not to dwell too long on the juxtapositions and references.  Instead, I kept turning the volume up - not to overcome some production shortcoming, but to dive deeper into the layers Friberg has built his work on.  Each decibel increased seemed to provide a new subaqueous creature, visible only in the auroral halo of the imagination.

Stark, honest, intelligent, emotive - this is an album that provides an aural canvas on which to transcend humanist ideas of beauty to instead examine the greater surround.  That is, it is a truly ambient album.