Hot on the heels of Leonardo Rosado’s “Mute Words” comes another poetry-and-music release, this one from new Portland, Oregon label Clothbound Recordings. “Elegy For Seaweed” consists of two 3-inch CD-Rs and eleven pages of poems from Nils Quak, lovingly presented in a handmade cloth-bound book. Produced in an edition of just 50, the release adheres to the current trend for specific, (almost) unique, highly crafted items. Is this merely another case of backlash against digitalisation, or something more substantial?First, the music. Nils Quak has been releasing work on labels such as Progressive Form, Audiobulb and Rural Colours since 2003, producing ambient drones and synthesized textures with the occasional touch of guitar or raw field recording. Musically “Elegy For Seaweed” is a dense, thickly layered album, but at no point does it begin to sound claustrophobic or turgid. Instead, the impression is one of speed – or rather, of a variety of different speeds, of speeding up and slowing down, running, walking, and crawling in slow motion. On tracks such as “Cascading Sunlight” different speeds are superimposed on top of each other, as the listener is simultaneously hurtled forwards at hyperspeed and held almost completely still. The effect resembles the way a collision between a ray of light and a solid surface can seem to occur both without motion and at incredible velocity – a phenomenon hinted at by the title of the final track of the first disc, “Statue of Light”.Quak’s poetry hops between four languages (English, German, French and Italian), and consists of captured moments, glimpses and fragments of conversation. The text is printed using an old-fashioned letterpress or typewriter and is covered with various corrections and deletions, as if to emphasise the materiality of the words, of ink on paper. Accompanying the poetry are several old sepia photographs of heavily furnished rooms. Although the connection between the poetry and the photographs appears tenuous, in terms of the overall project the images amplify a sense of a passing age and of nostalgia tipped gently towards the uncanny and the unsettling. This sense of unease doesn’t pertain to any specific element of the release, but rather emerges from the juxtaposition of music, text, image, and handcrafted object. Producing such juxtapositions is one area in which digital media often struggle, and one of the abilities that makes the specifically material format of works such as “Elegy For Seaweed” more than just a reactionary gimmick.With “Elegy For Seaweed” Nils Quak and Clothbound Recordings show that there is plenty of creativity and imagination left in the well-made physical product. Their approach emphasises and enhances the quality of the content rather than burying it in superfluous packaging, to the point where the packaging itself becomes content. While the music is certainly good enough to stand on its own two feet, the associations sparked by the relations between music, text, image, and physical object make for a much enriched experience.- Nathan Thomas for Fluid Radio