Dekmantel Podcast 190 - Varg

Jonas Rönnberg is full of ideas. Since 2013 he’s turned out 15 albums and a handful of EPs that find the Swede forever cooking up moody techno landscapes. His atmospheres are heavy, and there is always a bleakness to his work; a darkness to his drones that is cannot fail to suck you in. Labels like Northern Electronics and Semantica have proved perfect homes for his longform sounds, and serious as his music can be, the man himself is also very playful: his latest release is a romance inspired album that rushes with the excitement of falling in love and soars with acoustic guitars and lush pianos. Over the course of an hour here he shows off many contrasting sounds and offers a real snapshot of his hyper-active mind. One moment you’re up against of wall of glitch, then pop vocals and heavenly pianos, then suspensory ambient that is as beautiful as the beats that follow are brutal. It’s an ambitiously freeform session that never lets you settle in one place and, despite—or maybe because of—the strangeness of it all, cannot fail to hook you in.