★ "The Chapel" aired January 5th on Hearts of Space program #1362
v4.hos.com/programs/details/1362
"Winter Calm: Chilled ambient soundscapes for quiet winter nights."
Thanks so much to John & HOS for sharing Arin's heartfelt music.

Genres: Ambient, New Age, Neo-classical
RIYL: Jon Hopkins, Nils Frahm, Joep Beving, Ólafur Arnalds



AUDION: (Arin's moods…) can range from the mysteriously beautiful to melancholic to the really deep or sonically panoramic.

EXPOSÉ: Introspective minimalist piano shares a space with reflective ambient pieces, often together, with hints of experimentalism and dreamlike surrealism.
 

Twenty-four-year-old Norwegian Arin Aksberg follows upon his 2023 Projekt debut with an album of sparse, sensitive ambience. Utilizing piano, synths & processing, he began with the idea to detach from the intimately personal to craft an abstract soundscape. Nevertheless, life got in the way of such plans: the music organically evolved, deeply influenced by concurrent life events. NORDIC PATTERNS became a vessel carrying the weight and wonder of rediscovering his homeland at the same time as ending a relationship that traversed eight years of his life.

The tracks, charged with the spirit of the environment north of the Arctic Circle, are less about painting a vivid picture of Finnmark and more an invitation to perceive its essence.

"To me it's mostly nostalgia,” Arin reflects. "The longing for what once was, and the curiosity of what's to come. It's the feeling of being present in these lovely surroundings. Working on a project like this, I appreciate the land much more because in everyday life you start to forget how beautiful it is here. Thinking about all the history in these landscapes where the Sami and the Norwegians have lived for centuries — now we're living here and experiencing the same nature. Again back to nostalgia. I moved from Finnmark to the south at age 9. My ex-wife and I started dating at age 16 and 17; we've become adults together. In 2018 we moved back north to Alta and I got to re-experience the environment with her. In a way it’s honoring our memories here. Somehow it's just a way for me to have a sort of closure on all of that."

"NORDIC PATTERNS isn't really about showing you what my environment looks like. It's more about sharing my view, memories and perception on traveling in these lands. Remembering childhood road trips — the world unfolding in stillness from the backseat watching all these structures going by while also traversing the emotional journeys that accompany adulthood and change. Like experiencing beauty and sadness at the same time; how does that make me feel?"

Tracks such as “Skaidi” capture the duality of life’s tempests and tranquilities, where the sounds of a rumbling waterfall next to a storm barrier become a metaphor for life’s unpredictable journey. In the last few years, Arin found both a new beginning and closure, experiences that manifest in the album’s bookending tracks — a tribute to this significant chapter in life.

Projekt founder (and Black Tape For A Blue Girl synthesist) Sam Rosenthal guests on the track “Homecoming.” Arin comments that Sam’s synths "add a warm, human touch to the song with a bit of unpredictability, which we all experience somewhere in life."

"This album is an intuitive exploration,” Arin reflects, "one that does not seek definitive meaning but instead creates a space where meaning is both discovered and lost in the act of experience. I allowed instinct and introspective emotion to guide the composition.”

NORDIC PATTERNS captures the character of its Nordic roots while journeying through the vast landscapes of human emotion.
 

DAVE AFTANDILIAN: His closely observed compositions powerfully capture the fleeting beauty of a precise moment, showing how important it is that we pay attention to the world with wide-eyed wonder so that we do not miss the uniqueness of each sparkling fractal snowflake before it melts, or the hushed brilliance of the sun-diamonds on the wave-tips before their shimmering fades into darkness.