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Moodboard: I Break Horses

14 December 2014344 views0

Maria Lindén and Fredrik Balck’s second full-length as I Break Horses, Chiaroscuro, is a rather sublime thing. Whether the Swedish duo are dabbling in lurching witch-gaze (‘Medicine Brush‘) or blissful, escapist synth-pop (‘Denial‘), what really comes through is the clarity and immediacy of their compositions: instantly engrossing and, much like Maria’s favourite TV show Twin Peaks, incredibly hard to put down.

Given the album’s title, Chiaroscuro, which in painterly terms refers to the bold contrast between dark and light, perhaps it should come as no surprise that the two are able to shift between such distance moods and sonics with total ease; or, as Maria puts it below, “dance music for funerals.” To discover Chiaroscuro’s beautifully moonlit world, you can stream the album in full below and keep scrolling for an audio-visual guide to some of the record’s expectedly eclectic influences:

1. Twin Peaks

‘My favorite TV show of all-time. I love the surrealism, abstract art and the dream world where things don’t seem to have much logic at times and people’s identities shift and change. Also, hearing the theme song by Julee Cruise for the first time when I was a kid is one of my strongest musical memories.’

2. Big River Man

‘A documentary directed by John Maringouin.’

“In February 2007 Martin Strel began an insane attempt to be the first person to swim the entire length of the world’s most dangerous river, the Mighty Amazon – and to drink two bottles of red wine a day…even when swimming. Director John Maringouin set out to make an environmentally aware documentary about this eccentric, larger-than-life swimmer. He ended up journeying deep into the oppressively remote Amazon, following Martin and his team into their own Heart of Darkness as they descend into a nightmare of illness and insanity.”

3. Synthesizers