Product Description
1 Aerial
2 Shoshin Voyage
3 Alterations
4 Changing Tides
5 Wanderer Above
6 Day and Night
7 Evenfall
8 Tree of Life
9 Sellafield
10 Slow Sun
11 Solastalgia 1
DISK 2 (63:58)
1 Forever River
2 Prayer for Rain
3 Driftless Land
4 Pandrone
5 Dry River
6 Skyming
7 Light Pillars
8 The Onward Path
9 Solastalgia 2
10 Natural Habitat
2CD 6-panel digipak, limited to 500 copies. Final 10 copies.
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Echoes Radio November 2024 CD of the Month
Erik Wøllo’s Solastalgia is a monumental two-hour double CD of expansive, entrancing electronic music. Utilizing the striking, elegant vocabulary Wøllo has honed over 53 previous releases, his is a melodic vision of ambient electronics with lush arrangements brimming with promise. The 21 tracks display dazzling rhythmic pulses, shimmering textures and memorable ethereal lines.
This beauty is in service of a deeper story. “Solastalgia” — a term coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht — combines the Latin word for “comfort” and the Greek root for “pain, suffering, grief.” It describes the homesickness you experience when still at home as your environment undergoes significant change or degradation due to ecological damage and the loss of a connection to the natural world.
Erik reflects on this, “Being an artist in our time, it is impossible not to be affected by the big issues we face on our planet. Naturally, these matters will somehow influence the music I make. Every road we travel, every house we see, has resulted in a loss of our original ecosystems. For every computer, for every car or every new shirt, producing these has most probably erased areas of untouched wilderness. This is the paradox the term ‘Solastalgia’ addresses: the sadness and distress caused by awareness of the way we humans alter and destroy the earth to expand our lifestyle. In order to exist in the technologic world, we ravage our natural surroundings.
“These thoughts go back a long way in my mind, all the way back to childhood when my father chopped down a big area of trees on our farm to make a field for the cows. I played often in this forest. I felt very sad when it was gone — forever altered. Ravaging our surroundings is not sustainable, we need to change. But how? Another big paradox. I love my computer and my gear with which I produce my music; I like to have a car to go anywhere I want. And my house and a garden? Again a big paradox.
“For this album I imagined I was scoring a documentary film about threatened ecosystems. We venture into areas where damage has occurred. We see landscapes forever changed. We see how it originally was and how it has become today. There is a huge amount of nostalgia and sadness reflected in the music. I do not have solutions for this, and I do not want to be political about it. I am describing it. Uncovering something that perhaps few think about in their daily life.”
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Guiding the listener through rhythmic sequencer-based sections interspersed with misty ambient zones and soaring electric guitar textures, Solastalgia forms a many-faceted opus. This is music with an evocative and symbolic approach building upon several of Wøllo’s previous albums, in particular Gateway (2010) and his only previous studio 2CD release, Different Spaces (2017). Pulsing measured momentum moves through the morphing patterns and structures with intricate and passionate storytelling arrangements throughout. Disc 2 ends the poetic vision with “Natural Habitat,” featuring bird sounds recorded at Wøllo’s cottage where he makes most of his music.
Solastalgia is a poignant and powerful album, a rich embroidery of emotional beauty and dynamic energy. This double album’s shining synthesizers, atmospheric pads, subtle textures, consonant chords, and tender melodic phrasing highlights the existential issue of our time.
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Steve Roach: One Day of Forever (CD)
Erik Wøllo: Different Spaces (2CD)
Reviews Editor –
From Regen
A term coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht, Solastalgia is the ache of witnessing the familiar unravel – nostalgia turned inward, a mourning for the present as it erodes before our eyes, the sorrow of environmental change, the sense of displacement without movement. It is a longing not for what was, but for what should have remained. How is this sorrow reflected in Erik Wøllo’s album? The titles themselves disclose a bit, hinting at distance and loss, at shifting horizons and fleeting serenity. Yet, it is in the music where this concept takes its fullest shape as Wøllo constructs vast sonic landscapes, carefully layered with shimmering electronics, deep melancholic pads, and crystalline melodies that feel both intimate and endless.
Solastalgia is saturated with emotion, its details sculpted with precision, each piece a delicate balance of fragility and sharpness, like shards of glass catching the light or droplets of water suspended in sound. Some compositions unfold rapidly, surging forward as if chasing the last remnants of a vanishing world. Others invite us in gently, ephemeral, and weightless, spun from spiderweb filaments of sound. There are moments of templelike profundity, where the music carries an almost sacred dignity, and then, suddenly, playful chimes ripple through the air like wind-stirred bells, carefree and fleeting. This shifting musical soundscape feels like an overwhelming exhibition that relies on imagination rather than imagery. Wøllo paints with sound, his brushstrokes intangible, yet so vivid that one needs no effort to see them. -Karolina Kratochwil
Reviews Editor –
From Star’s End
Our relationship with Erik Wøllo has progressed over many years, just as it has deepened. Throughout his Solastalgia (130:38) we again find a musician trying to make sense of the Spacemusic form while inhabiting its emotional depths. Proposing a majestic sense of scale, space and time the 21 tracks exert a rare dramatic force. As digital dreams and minimal moments blossom into meaning, they kiss the nocturnal air – striking a lush night-of-your-life tone of romanticism. Utilizing a myriad of pedals and processing Wøllo’s playing yields textures rich and varied. Riding atop rising rhythms of electronic percussion, arrangements of lulling chords, propulsive electric guitar figures and yearning string harmonies find a forlorn beauty within the impeccable swirl of notes. Further in, the melancholy murmuring of softer synthesizers send forth sublime sounds and sweet airs. From every ethereal movement arises a wondrous sustained atmosphere – safe zones where we may breath easy with the music. Like hearing someone’s secret, or sensing a whisper against the skin, Solastalgia elicits deeper feelings than intended. In these beautifully crafted moments of grace Wøllo is fearless enough to imagine a future of possibilities – showing us that the richness of the human inner life is utterly inexhaustible. -Chuck van Zyl/STAR’S END
Reviews Editor –
From Echoes Radio
Lost Landscapes with Erik Wøllo’s Solastalgia: Echoes November 2024 CD of the Month
The world is changing. Even if you are a climate change denier, you can see the landscape around you altering as development replaces forests and farmland and industry builds giant warehouses and business centers on what used to be open fields. As you watch the woodlands you played in and the meadows you wandered through as a child being plowed under and built up; as the sound of construction replaces the sound of birds in the trees and wind through the leaves, you might be suffering from solastalgia. That’s a term coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht that combines “solace,” “solus”(grief) and “-algia” to mark the existential depression you feel as the environment changes. The prolific Norwegian guitarist and electronic musician Erik Wøllo uses this term as the basis of a double CD of tone poems called Solastalgia, reflecting those changes and what has been lost.
Erik Wøllo should be no stranger to Echoes listeners or fans of electronic, space and progressive music. He’s been a fixture on the show from the very beginning of Echoes 35 years ago. And he was at it before then, releasing his debut in 1983 and dropping some 53 albums since then. At least eight of those have been Echoes CD of the Month picks.
Solastalgia is vintage Erik Wøllo, with the cyclical grooves, arching textures and soaring, but never pyrotechnic guitar. He’s sculpted a tone poem traversing these environmental changes and loss. While it is full of melancholy, I think you will also find some solace here.
The opening track. “Aerial,” serves as an overview thematically and musically, beginning in space and floating high with the clouds, looking down on the planet. Wøllo gradually accelerates into a churning, almost African rhythm that surges while he lays long curling guitar sustains over the top.
Wøllo plays a lot with rhythm, never using a straight four-four without adding a lot of syncopation. That’s how “Shoshin Voyage” evolves. It begins with a syncopated four-four groove topped by a simple, to the point of childlike, melody on synth-guitar, switching timbres to a bluesy, more conventional guitar sounding melody, sparely placed in the shifting landscape of the ongoing groove.
Wøllo’s melodies on Solastalgia are always spare and simple, only a few notes, which can make them sound like variations or simply the same thing. “Alternations” seems to be a reworking of “Shoshin Voyage” with a similar melody, but very different mechanical rhythm spiked by a softly clanging metallic accent.
“Forever River” lives up to its title. It has the feel of an endless flow as Wøllo lays a slowly pulsing rhythm worming through electronic eddies, until a guitar reaches out with another spare melody, before synths and/or guitar – hard to tell with Wøllo – soar like siren cries, long and yearning.
While Wøllo’s music is predominantly electronic, he does have an organic quality to his sound which goes back to his 1992 release, Solstice. You can hear that on tracks like “Prayer for Rain” with its tribal acoustic drum sound and sequencers fluttering in and out.
Sequencers do dominate this album. Every track is based on a rhythm loop that is usually joined by multiple melodic cycles revolving like overlayed wind-spinners. “Pandrone” is one of the most upbeat tracks on Solastalgia, with a thudding bass loop underpinning multiple sequencer cycles and an anthemic melody fragment loop. It is one of many tracks that reveal the influence of Tangerine Dream in his work.
There are 21 tracks on Solastalgia, the longest being nearly eleven minutes. That is “Light Pillars” which again, features a steady sequencer pulse and is almost entirely based around its electronic percussive cycles. Wøllo lays-in more of that sustained guitar, which is either a slide or EBow guitar.
Although Wøllo has collaborated with many musicians, the bulk of his work has been as a solo artist, toiling away in his studio on Hvaler, an island in the south of Norway. How much more isolated can you get? And you hear that in his music, a solitary reverie born out of solitude and silence. In that quiet Erik Wøllo traverses a landscape that shifts between the conscious and the unconscious, memories and laments. And there is no doubt that Wøllo is aware of the contradiction: that he accomplishes all this with technology while experiencing solastalgia. But overall, apart from its themes, Solastalgia the album, is a bath of drifting reverie, a voyage into the sublime and the serene. -John Diliberto
Reviews Editor –
From Chain DLK
Erik Wøllo’s Solastalgia is a deeply emotional, meditative exploration of the existential grief tied to environmental destruction. The title, borrowed from Glenn Albrecht’s concept, embodies the pain of witnessing a home irreversibly changed. Over two hours, Wøllo crafts a melancholic, ethereal journey where ambient textures, shimmering sequences, and delicate guitar lines evoke a sense of wonder and loss.
Technically, it’s a masterclass in ambient composition – each track a fine weave of analog and digital soundscapes, punctuated by gentle ebbs and soaring crescendos. His sequencing, especially on tracks like “Aerial” and “Forever River”, invites comparison to fellow ambient luminaries like Steve Roach and Robert Rich, yet Wøllo maintains his own melodic sensibility, a kind of Nordic chilliness that feels personal, intimate.
The album oscillates between pulsing, rhythmic pieces—like “Day and Night”, with its subtle propulsion—and the vast atmospheric zones of tracks like “Solastalgia 1”, allowing listeners to drift between a futuristic dystopia and serene, yet fragile, natural landscapes. The environmental themes never feel heavy-handed; instead, the music becomes a subtle lament, a call to introspection rather than action.
Wøllo’s reflective narrative speaks to a paradox: the love for technology, for the creative tools that shape his art, and the recognition that this very progression erodes the untouched wilderness he so mourns. Solastalgia is, at its core, a philosophical soundtrack to the complexities of living in an age where technological marvels and natural beauty are constantly at odds.
The closing track, “Natural Habitat”, with its recorded bird calls, is almost heart-wrenching in its simplicity – nature’s voice slowly fading amidst the technological symphony. While ambient music often slips into background listening, Solastalgia demands engagement. It is not just an album but an emotional experience, an invitation to reflect on the irreversible changes around us.
In Solastalgia, Wøllo reaches beyond ambient escapism, creating something that feels both personal and profoundly universal, a meditation on the beauty and sorrow of living in a world on the brink of collapse. Rating: 4/5 -Vito Camarretta