Jörgen Gustafsson lives in Jönköping, Sweden. A Darkened Harbour is his debut album set to be released on Ombrelle Concrète on Friday 1st March, 2024.
The Limited Edition CD and Digital Download is available to pre-order now.
Jörgen Gustafsson’s A Darkened Harbour arrives a few months after the Canadian author Ryan Quinn Flanagan’s Whale Song Across a Darkened Harbour – a short poem that seems to suggest an Ahab that endured and now sits ‘a man of great age and weather’. Gustafsson’s work is similarly mature and contemplative, at times evoking the ‘mortuary stillness’ of the poem.
Jörgen’s music is characterised by slowly moving bass under sharp melodic punctuation; melancholy pads reminiscent of a harmonium swell and recede from counterpoints of pacific precision; gentle fogs of sound transform into slow squalls before dying away.
The phrase ‘A Darkened Harbour’ is taken from a Swedish psalm “Don’t Be Afraid” and Jörgen cites hymns and sacred music among his inspiration for this album – influences that are apparent in more than one track. The pieces move at a stately pace and build to choral resolutions. A Darkened Harbour is a truly fine piece of work described fittingly by the final line of Flanagan’s poem – a collection of ‘breathless unmoved depths’.