What would happen if you walked across the horizontal landscape in a tiny Norwegian island in the middle of your neighbourhood? What you would do? Well, you would record different locations, hear various dialogs, and create this ambient sound by making it a day in the life by living in the modern world. For White Willow’s founder Jacob Holm-Lupo, he brings the sounds to life on his solo debut, Entire of Itself.
Listening to this 51-minute composition, you feel as if you’re inside a dream with the click-clacking effects, and elements of the steampunk and biopunk textures that’ll make you revisit the Victorian and Art Deco structures in a futuristic tone. The sounds have a combination between electronic, acoustic-folk, water bubbling noises, different paths of the weather going from hot to cold, and beyond the freezing levels that is minus 52 degrees in the middle of a heavy snow storm.
Lupo is very much like a composer, and a filmmaker by bringing this suite to life. You can tell that he looks up to Andrei Tarkovsky, Werner Herzog, Stanley Kubrick, and Hayao Miyazaki. There are moments where you would hear a conversation between two people in the middle of a bluesy forest with crows cawing out in the distance while changing the scenery in the middle of the Mojave Desert that is in extreme heat levels with a Rypdal-sque approach.
Most of the time, you feel as if you’re following Jacob, hanging around with various people, speaking in Norwegian, and having a conversation between two people while the waves crash unexpectedly. It adds that intensive vibe for the hurricane to hit at any second. You hear humming sounds of a woman, walking across the beautiful forest in the middle of some heavy rain, radio static changing from station to another, and some eerie Van der Graaf approaches that’ll make you want to dig out Pawn Hearts again in the midsection of ‘A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers’.
It does have some elements of the movie S.T.A.L.K.E.R with these industrial rock sounds that has a menacing punch to the guy that’ll bleed like a motherfucker. And for Lupo, he goes straight for the jugular in the last nine minutes of the piece when by bringing the whole shebang to the forefront.
Entire of Itself may not be everyone’s cup of tea per se, but Jacob has come a long way by proving listeners that he’s more than just the founder of White Willow, Donner, and The Opium Cartel to name a few. But this album, you might want to play it with a candle, burning bright and leave the lights off for fifty-one minutes. Because it’ll haunt you for the rest of eternity.
