"ORMENS VÄG (Way of A Serpent) is the first solo release by Gothenburg artist Markus Samnell, whose major body of musical work typically veers into "extreme electronics" territory, most consistently through the industrial project Feberdröm.
Ormens Väg is a very different recording though, while there is still a bleakness that haunts the music, it is not exactly dark, more portentous in an kind of folkloric way and despite a roughness to the sound it is often more melancholy than harsh. A vaguely sinister vein runs through the whole tape, which effortlessly mixes stripped down melodic songs with saturated layered rhythmic tracks: psychish slithering fuzz guitar and percussive drumming blends with cold swirling synthscapes, free form abstractions, synth flutes and brass, mechanical rhythms and in the final massive track 'Angeredsbron', a hypnotic mass of sound driven by the live drumming of Björn Eriksson (Swordwielder, Agrimonia). This ecclectic collection of songs is ultimately tied together by mood rather than formula. There is a strong sense of composition and progression between tracks which reads like some untold narrative or journey into an imaginary landscape.
All in all Ormens Väg owes a lot to 70's experimentalism, 80's synth-soundtracks and ambient/new age-music; Cluster II, Popol Vuh soundtracks, Älgarnas Trädgård, Anna Själv Tredje, Igor Wakhevitch's HATHOR album, Mirage-era Klaus Schulze or Bobby Beausoleils Lucifer Rising-soundtrack and much more, with a sort of focused sloppiness and idiosyncratic sound, which helps retaining its own identity and does not root it in a specific genre."
Self-released, 2024