Deaf Center

Deaf Center, the Norwegian duo of cellist Erik Skodvin and pianist Otto Totland (both members of the Miasmah Quartet), crafted the psycho-ambient music of Pale Ravine (Type, 2005) by setting in motion collages of field recordings and classical instruments. The stately wall of drones of Lobby , the neoclassical adagio suspended in a glitchy spacetime warp of Thread, the floating cosmic music of Path to Lucy, the new-age piano sonata White Lake, and the impressionistic vignette for piano and clusters of chords of Stone Beacon pretty much fixed the coordinates of the album. In most of the pieces there is only a silhouette of sound, a general blueprint, a rough sketch, that does not turn into a full-fledged organism. If the first half of the album is mostly contemplative, the second half contains a few pieces that display a narrative. Weir presents stately waves and then explores their interior via a stream of glitchy noise before merging the two planes; ghostly musique concrete permeates Loft, the gothic apex; the sustained chords of the string section creates the effect of the fog in Fog Animal; and the symphonic Thunder Night overflows with melodrama and suspense even if not much happens.

Erik Skodvin inaugurated the project Svarte Greiner with Knive (Type, 2006), an album of mournful slo-motion free-form acoustic folk dirges drifting through distant and murky acoustic soundscapes. It was also one of the manifestos of "acoustic doom" music. Room Forever (Forced Exposure, 2008), that includes a side of field recordings, the mini-album Man Bird Dress (SMTG Limited, 2008) and the cassette Penpals Forever (Digitalis, 2008 - Type, 2010) were minor works. On the other hand, Kappe (Type, 2009), containing just four lengthy ieces, was a fragile and hallucinated counterpoint to the first Svarte Greiner album.

Deaf Center's Owl Splinters (Type, 2011) explores wildly different settings: the strident slow dense instrumental and vocal churning of Divided could be the soundtrack for a free fall into a black hole; Time Spent is a tiny neoclassical piano lullaby; New Beginning Tidal Darkness is an impressionistic painting for cascading water and droning strings; Animal Sacrifice turns a cello solo into a psychological nightmare; Hunted Twice is icy chamber music for arctic landscapes. The eleven-minute The Day I Would Never Have tops everything else with its crescendo of piano, cello, glitches and scream-like drones that dies out in aquatic piano notes.

The mini-album Recount (2014) collects two lengthy Deaf Center pieces: Oblivion (13:40) from 2008 and Follow Still (13:27) from 2012. The latter is the ultimate meditation piece, the former is a loud and dynamic cosmic composition.

SGAR (2011) was a collaboration with Alexander Rishaug.

Aidan Baker, Andrea Belfi and Erik Skodvin released albums as B/B/S/: Brick Mask (Miasmah, 2013), Coltre / Manto (Midira, 2014), NK012 (Umor Rex, 2015) and Palace (Miasmah, 2016).

Svarte Greiner remained Skodvin's main vehicle, documented on Black Tie (Miasmah, 2013), Moss Garden (2016), Apart (2017) and Devolving Trust (2022).

Meanwhile, Totland released two solo piano albums.

They reunited as Deaf Center for Low Distance (2019), whose compositions are on the slower, humbler side of ambient music. Random piano notes and glitchy noises ripple through the stagnant atmosphere of Entity Voice. The effect is less magic in Gathering, where the noises are louder and the piano is less sedated. Movements/ The Ascent tries a different strategy: a crescendo of droning over hypnotic piano patterns. It is surprising that some of the pieces last only three minutes: Faded Earth dies just when it was becoming scary. Far Between is a delicate experiment of music that cannot sound.