Originally available from Reverb Worship, now download-only.

On their inaugural outing together, Norwegian psychedelic-pop and experimental artist Oliver Kersbergen and American psych-folk/folktronica artist Katje Janisch team up to explore bold new musical horizons. Having collaborated together on Oliver’s 2018 release Winter Crickets with his band Sleepyard, the two were delighted when an easy flow of ideas quickly blossomed into a project all of its own.

Over the years, both artists have made a solid name for themselves in the global psychedelic community-- Janisch with an outpouring of wyrd, medievalist, psych-tinged folk songs, culminating in her 2015 debut album “West of Twilight,” and Kersbergen with 20 + years (and five official full length releases) of experimental pop balladry written and performed with his brother Svein Kersbergen in Sleepyard.

On their current offering, Kersbergen & Janisch present seven dynamic, slow-burning compositions-- all of which elegantly demonstrate the bucolic “back to nature” possibilities inherent in contemporary electronica. Replete with nods to pioneering synthesists Dieter Moebius and Hans Joachim Roedelius, they conjure an otherworldly diorama of traditional instrumentation and wispy synths that warmly percolates from a bygone era. Throughout the album, Kersbergen’s signature drones and hallucinatory guitar sounds combine with Janisch’s eclectic blend of folk instruments and ambient textures to create a multifaceted sonic experience- one that contains elements of rural psychedelia, minimalist electronica, neo-classical drone, faerie tales, folk-noir, lush, layered soundscapes, and musique concrete.

In true cinematic fashion, Kersbergen and Janisch weave a magical musical narrative that is at once folkloric, mythic, and distinctly modern. This is contemporary instrumentation at its most archaic, dreamlike, and ineffable-- a rapturous, 39 minute, field-and-forest induced fever dream.

“Kersbergen and Janisch” will received a limited issue release on Reverb Worship on September 18, 2018.

Press release by St. Cyprian of The Unquiet Meadow



Below, from The Sunday Experience by Mark Barton:

(marklosingtoday.wordpress.com/2018/07/19/kersbergen-janisch/)

Up next, something from Sleepyard’s Oliver Kersbergen found here paired up with Katje Janisch for an Autumnal scheduled full length entitled simply ‘Kersbergen & Janisch’. Herewith, a divine and teasingly demurred sample off what to expect in the shape of this beautifully beguiled three track trimming. Fusing elements of spectral folk, minimalist electronics and chamber folk classicism, these mellowed miniature portraits are carved with a deceptive sparse touch whose ghosting sublimely detracts from their unerring ability to colour a deeply mesmeric though all the same vivid landscape, none more so is this the case than on the parting 10 minute visitation ‘outer wave’. Emerging as were, from some foggy ghost light, the stilled almost frosted atmospherics and sense of bewitched ceremony collude to conspire a mystical landscape eerily spirited away in twilight dream drifts, the effect at once trippy and woozy oozes delicately much like a fabled gathering of mythical sirens beckoning with their spell charms through a magically trancey haze, something which I suspect will appeal first port of call to those admiring of Preterite Likewise teased in a spectral murmuring, the cavernous hollowing of the chamber noir entrancement of ‘indigo skyglow’ softly melts to reveal a beautifully ice formed floral posy shimmered tenderly in hymnal like glassy string sighed bowed refractions. For us though personally, best moment of the three-track teaser showcase is ‘sunrise cycle’ which set to a lilting clock-work framing, trades to an alluring gathering of ice tipped garlands, angelic frostings and sepia tweaked sleepy headed yawns as it delicately stirs from slumber, its an utterly disarming listening experience with the tip-toing recitals and cooing chorus’ almost drawing to mind the work of Jodie Lowther. Need I say more.

(This is a review of the three song preview. The full length album consists of seven tracks.)