Erik Klinga – Hundred Tongues
(Self Release)
DL available here
January 23 2026
Swedish composer Erik Klinga creates an inspiring and regenerative ambient album, full of subtle contrasts and tough melancholy.
The Flemish master painter Peter Paul Rubens often used expanses of dun colours or light greys to highlight the suspense happening elsewhere in his canvases. This orchestration of emotion – namely, where we should look, or what we should feel when we look there – is found four centuries later in its aural form, in the work of Erik Klinga.
Like Rubens, the Swede conjures emotion out of structure and crafts a space we can all benefit from. Art in the modern world draws on a wider set of resources. The elements in this particular record’s making are nothing surprising if you know the field. The usual sonic grimoire is assembled: Malmö Art Museum’s sixteenth-century Genarpsorgan, a Buchla, and field recordings from Skåne and Öland. Still: with Hundred Tongues, Klinga’s made a beautiful record that we can all return to, to revive ourselves, courtesy of our own imaginings.
You may think the Rubens stuff mentioned above is an improbable comparison, but the thought of Rubens’s works sat with me because of the way his art sticks around without much else – outside of the art – to recommend it. There is a lot to revel in, even without the visual cues that a seventeenth-century viewer would have instantly got. This is true, also, of Klinga’s ambient soundscapes, the memory of which, in their patient revelations, flirt with the listener over time. The counterpoints weighed against each other are masterful, as in a track like Fall Again where the atonal, or flat, notes balance themselves carefully and patiently, like a ballet dancer at the barre. The monstrous eighteen-minute title track uses recordings of birdlife chattering above the shifting, glacial layers of sound. The found sounds are an anchor here and give the track a presence that allows the ambient passages to take an elegiac shape, regardless of the waves of atonal hum, traffic noises and coughing(!), that intrude over time. There is plenty to discover on repeat listen.
The way the record builds is key to this: with Hundred Tongues the content of each piece lends itself to the story of the next: a perfect sonic relay race in which, from the quiet thrum of the opener Spring to Mind, we get the ultimate payoff with the tumescent swell of the organ halfway through the last (title) track. If yet more jaw around seventeenth-century painting makes you yawn, then I’d offer the comparison of the wyrd balancing of emotional sonic counterpoints found in Klaus Schultze’s Cyborg or Irrlicht, where the beautiful is locked in a continual battle with the strange.
We are living in very difficult times. This is a record to use in defence: defiance, almost.
More about Erik Klinga can be found here. Erik Klinga’s site is here.
All words by Richard Foster. More writing by Richard can be found at his author’s archive.
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