Compositions

Norwegian producer Helge Sten’s quasi-industrial ambient music as Deathprod is the sound of how you might imagine a dark street at night: spacious, seductive, threatening, still. What sets *Compositions* apart from his other albums isn’t just its relative gentleness, but its scale: no tracks over four minutes, some as short as one. The effect shifts the emphasis from the presence of sound—older Deathprod tracks routinely ran eight, nine, and 10 minutes—to the absence of it, pulling you toward a center that never materializes and feeding you dissonance with a touch so light that it starts to sound almost sweet (“Composition 4,” “Composition 11”). Unsettling, yes—and he does it better than most.

Oslo’s Deathprod (aka Helge Sten) announces Compositions, his new album out January 27th on Smalltown Supersound, and presents its lead single/video, “Composition 1.” The first new Deathprod studio project since 2019’s OCCULTING DISK—“a mesmerizing, terrifying, and emotionally nuanced ‘anti-fascist ritual’ of an album” (Pitchfork)—Compositions is the result of an intense period at his legendary Audio Virus Lab studio in central Oslo. All tracks are released in chronological order – in other words, the order in which they were recorded. Sten used a personal, unique combination of obsolete digital audio processors and sound generators, combined with his own secret-sauce tuning system. His specialty is a deeply atmospheric, grainy minimalism that slows time down and explores the very particles of sound itself. Lead single “Composition 1” doubles as Compositions’ opening track, and looms over its nearly 4-minute runtime. An eerie and sparse track, “Composition 1” gently submerges listeners in Deathprod’s new soundscape. On Compositions, the music can sound forbidding and alien at first, but compared to his more brutal output, it’s an extraordinarily close and intimate experience, directing your attention to a succession of ever more spellbinding details and textures.

Deathprod’s ‘Compositions’ is an intriguing experiment in contrast and contradiction, marked by both absence and presence, noise and silence.

Ambient is everywhere now. After a quiet (lol) 2000s, when it rather disappeared into the cracks, perhaps tarred with the sense that the more cosmic sides of the Nineties rave experience were passé, beatless music steadily rose in profile through the 2010s – aided by the rise of “post-classical”, increased accustomisation to home cinema and immersive gaming soundtracks, the wellness movement.